UN Summit on Climate Change in Paris – Destined to Fail or Succeed?

... emissions. In contrast, a new agreement is being negotiated in the framework of universal participation and hence all nations will have to reduce their GHG emissions . The devil is as usual in detail. The price for getting all nations on board (US and China in particular) was a conceptual rethink of the top-down system of the Kyoto Protocol which defined a common target for GHG emission reductions and translated it into legally-binding targets for individual countries. A new agreement will follow a bottom-up approach where nations themselves decide on what actions they are ...