Correlating negotiation hotspot issues, Paris climate agreement and the international climate policy regime

Delali Benjamin K. Dovie and Shuaib Lwasa

Environmental Science & Policy, 2017, vol. 77, issue C, 1-8

Abstract: The concerns over climate change negotiation, decision texts and links to domestic policy interests of countries to keep warming within an acceptable limit have become the ‘hotspot issues’ of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Hotspot issues are the human – political economy factors which have evolved over time from negotiation texts or phrases, principles or behaviors with tendencies to influence climate negotiations yet cannot be identified with the scientific literature. Whilst big emitters have been accused as having hegemony over the negotiations, the effects of disunity amongst the parties over domestic policy interests have been overlooked. Hence the article examines the emergence of hotspot issues and how they manifest within the international climate policy regime. The Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) of 130 countries submitted before the Paris agreement, were analyzed using the following texts: Adaptation, Mitigation, Co-benefits, Finance, Land use, Food security, Poverty, Resilience, Green growth, Green economy, Sustainable development, Biodiversity, Ecosystem services and Conservation. Of these, ‘adaptation’ was cited 2780 times, 1956 for ‘mitigation’ and 32 for ‘ecosystem services’ in the nature conservation category. Ten phases of the climate policy regime and historical hotspot issues were identified for the period 1980–2030. ‘Adaptation’ and mitigation appeared more frequently in the INDCs and correlated with each other (r=0.56), as the two correlated further with ‘land use’ (0.50Keywords: Adaptation; Ambitious targets; COP; Ghana; Mitigation; Multilateralism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enscpo:v:77:y:2017:i:c:p:1-8

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2017.07.010

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