The Paris Agreement Revisited: Diplomatic Triumphalism or Denial of Climate Justice?

Abstract

The 2015 Paris COP 21, after the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen COP, raised many expectations regarding the elaboration of the post-Kyoto legal instrument to lead the global fight against climate change. At the sunset of the summit, world leaders and climate negotiators, relayed by mainstream Medias, presented the results of the Paris climate discussions as an important success for the global climate community. A success contested by climate justice and just transition defenders. Given the foundation role the Paris agreement plays for subsequent global, national and sub-national climate policies on one side and, on the other side, the continuous growing global demands for climate justice and just transition, this article investigates the conciliatory possibilities put in place by the agreement to advance those demands. To reach such goals, the article focuses on the retrospective critical reading of the agreement in the light of human-centered climate perspectives such as climate justice and just transition, without neglecting other aspects related to the very nature of the agreement, and the enhanced commodification of nature and resulting carbon trading. This analysis of the agreement through climate justice lenses will be instrumental in confirming or disproving the following hypothesis: From the climate justice and just transition perspectives, the success of the Paris regime will not pass through the implementation of the Paris agreement itself, but thought corrective mechanisms that could be put in place to correct the loopholes of the agreement. The initiative of putting such post-Paris corrective mechanisms in place is expected to be one of the key priorities of the international community.