Climate Justice Under the Paris Agreement : Framework and Substance

The Paris Agreement is the first treaty under the global climate regime to mention ‘climate justice’ as a concept. Given this unprecedented legal turn of the concept, the article reports a sociolegal study of climate justice, framing and assessing the substantive policy issues arising from the post-Paris negotiations of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Gleaned from these framework and policy issues leading to the Glasgow COP in 2021, how does climate justice look under the Paris Agreement? Drawing on the author’s lived, legal practice and civil society experience, carrying out a doctrinal analysis of the UNFCCC and its instruments, and reviewing pivotal and representative literature and policy documents, the article claims that climate justice faces the fundamental challenge of state sovereignty. The author creates the conceptual and policy framework to identify the substantive issues converging on this fundamental challenge, assessing four of them: state self-centredness in addressing adaptation, state influence on the progress made on loss and damage, state autonomy and discretion in providing finance, and state-based policy-making that undermines inclusive decision-making. State and non-state actors are addressing these substantive issues already under the UNFCCC and beyond, and litigation has become a cross-cutting remedy. However, the fundamental challenge of state sovereignty remains