Addressing a Davos audience last year, in January 2022, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida publicly declared his vision for an Asia Zero Emissions Community (AZEC). Under Tokyo’s leadership, Kishida said, AZEC would drive regional cooperation and joint financing on renewable energy technologies and infrastructure, standardisation, and an emissions trading zone. A year on, Prime Minister…
The principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR), formalized at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, is ultimately pertaining to the matter of climate justice. Its basic meaning is first and foremost a “shared” moral responsibility between different groups of countries to address global climate change, nevertheless the proportions of such responsibility are differentiated. CBDR’s underlying concepts of fairness and equity has also been manifested in other global governance architectures than just the climate. The World Trade Organization, for example, knows the principle of “special and differential treatment” for developing and least-developed countries. The CBDR principle has gone through “ups and downs” in the past 30 years and the world has further evolved. While it is entering the fourth decade, it still remains relevant today.
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If there ever was a litmus test on whether the world would cooperate in solidarity in the midst of the greatest global challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic provided such a test given its transferability across borders and the need for a rapid global response. In this blog post I argue that the onset and response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a watershed event that has significantly – or perhaps irreversibly – ushered the world where cooperation will be more challenging than ever before.
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On 24 February, Russia invaded Ukraine. The invasion prompted a strong reaction from the EU in a manner and speed that few had anticipated. Just a week prior, the EU summit with the African Union convened 40 African heads of state and government and 27 of their European colleagues. As the global setting for EU…
BY_NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet – Moser på Nordøst-Grønland, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10005884
The war in Ukraine gives reason to fear the worst: Will the Arctic turn again into a region of confrontation, remain a region of cooperation or become a region “on hold”? Three scenarios for future collaboration in the Arctic and their implications for global cooperation on climate change…
