Road to Paris COP21 : Towards Soft Global Governance for Climate Change?

This article explores recent climate policy developments in China, the United States (US), and the European Union (EU), as well as their implications for a new global climate regime, expected in December 2015 in Paris. The road to Paris is marked by a shift from global efforts to domestic actions on climate change mitigation, as well as a move from commitments to contributions to carbon emissions reduction. It is argued that the new regime is moving towards a voluntary national pledge and review system which deviates from the EU's desire for a legally binding climate treaty, bringing any Paris deal closer to the US's and China's vision of soft global governance for climate change. This puts a big question mark on whether and how a soft regime could potentially achieve an atmospheric CO2 concentration below 450 parts per million in order to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius