This course provides an overview over the climate regime, with a particular focus on climate governance and climate finance. On 12 December 2015, 196 Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement, a new legally-binding framework for an internationally coordinated effort to tackle climate change. The Paris Agreement defines a universal, legal framework to ‘strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change’ (Art. 2). It establishes the obligation of all Parties to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. For the first time, all countries will develop plans on how to contribute to climate change mitigation, and will communicate their ‘nationally determined contributions’ to the Secretariat of One of the pillars of the climate regime is the commitment to support developing countries in their efforts to abate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the consequences of climate change. Support can come in the form of capacity building, technology transfer and finance (together: means of implementation). In this course, we will dive a bit deeper in the conditions and instruments of climate finance. We will discuss the channels of finance and the modalities on how finance is being awarded. In this context the class will learn about carbon pricing and carbon markets. close

Kuyper, J., Schroeder, H., and Linnér, B.-O. (2018) The Evolution of the UNFCCC, Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2018. 43:343–68. Hsu, A., Moffat, A.S., Weinfurter, A.J., Schwartz, J.D. (2015), Towards a new climate diplomacy, Nature Climate Change, pp. 501-503. Dimitrov, R., Climate Diplomacy (2015), in: Research Handbook on Climate Governance, edited by Karin Bäckstrand, Eva Lövbrand, Chapter 9. UNFCCC Secretariat. Introduction to climate finance? Gupta, A. (2016), Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol: An Overview, in: Chapter 1; Handbook of Environmental and Sustainable Finance (2016), p.3-23. close