The Paris climate change agreement and after

In a turn towards pragmatism the Paris Climate Change Agreement, concluded in December 2015, adopted a markedly different architecture for global climate governance. It remains to be seen if pragmatism produces effectiveness. However, in lieu of the approach under the Kyoto Protocol, where binding emission reduction targets for Annex 1 Parties (broadly, the industrialized countries) to the Protocol were arrived at by a formula, the Paris Agreement records Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) arrived at independently by the Parties and submitted to the United Nations. This turn towards an independent, non-binding and voluntary vocabulary for targets and efforts by countries to combat climate change is the result of strident resistance by some developed countries (most notably, the United States) to the arrangement arrived at in the Kyoto Protocol that placed the responsibility for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigations during the first commitment period (2008–2012) entirely on the industrialized economie