The international law of climate change.

• Author: Dunlop, Emma
• Position: Editorial

This issue of the Australian International Law Journal('AILJ') engages with a challenge that will dominate international law and legal institutions throughout this century--climate change. We are most grateful to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr Ben Saul, for allowing us this opportunity to solicit contributions from leading Australian scholars and practitioners working and researching in the field of international climate law for this special symposium issue of the AlLJ.

International law has always been at the centre of responses to climate change. This began in 1988 when the United Nations General Assembly noted that 'climate change is a common concern of mankind' and encouraged the international community to agree on concrete measures to address the problem. (1) The main products of ensuing international legal responses were the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2) (VNFCCC) and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (3) While the UNFCCC articulates fundamental objectives, the most important being to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would avoid dangerous climate change, the Kyoto Protocol sought to make material progress towards this objective through specific emissions limitation or reduction targets for industrialised countries.

Since these foundation stones for international climate law were first laid, there has been much talk but little action in building a truly effective regime to tackle climate change. This is not least due to the United States' unwillingness, under President George W Bush, to recognise the legitimacy of international climate law, (4) a position which enjoyed Australian support until the change of government in late 2007. The world is now looking to Copenhagen in 2009 when the two-year process of negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, initiated at the Bali climate change summit in December 2007, will to come to a head. The dramatic disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is in line with recent assessments (5) that dangerous climate change is occurring far more rapidly than anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. (6) However, there is no guarantee that Copenhagen will produce agreement on the massive and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that arc required to meet the objective of the UNFCCC.

In her contribution to this symposium issue, Shirley Scott, one of Australia's foremost scholars of...