INTRODUCTION
For a long time, policymakers and scholars have recognised that individuals and firms, as well as governments, must act to limit climate change. For example, in a well-known 2009 working paper for the World Bank, the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom argued for a polycentric, rather than a singularly global, approach to limiting climate change. Ostrom’s argument was that even though climate change is a global phenomenon, limiting it requires actions at multiple scales – local, regional, national and global – by private and public actors. In retrospect, Ostrom’s paper seems like one of a number of scholarly works published in the early twenty-first century offering an intellectual rationale for the decentralised, multi-actor, bottom-up approach that countries embraced in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Instead of assigning countries binding emissions reduction targets, the Paris Agreement requires countries to identify their own targets and report on their progress. It also recognises the importance of expanding the actors involved in decarbonisation beyond national governments …
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Katrina M Wyman, Public and Private Law for Decarbonisation, King’s Law Journal. Published online: 29 July 2024.
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