Beyond the Paris Agreement: Climate change policy negotiations and future directions

At the conclusion of the Paris conference, this paper provides a review of the history of international negotiations on global warming for the past three decades with an emphasis on details of Paris agreements. Founding documents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are reviewed. Major outcomes as well as conflicts on the stringency of global mitigation efforts observed from the series of Conferences of the Parties (COP) since 1992 are explained: Rio Earth Summit, Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen Accord, Cancun Agreement, Durban Platform, and Paris Agreement. The development of the financial instrument called the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the tensions among the parties on the fund are reviewed. The paper describes the current states of the global negotiations on various fronts at the aftermath of the Paris COP. The paper concludes by putting forth future directions of the negotiations and the ideal policies that can be agreed upon at the international level, which focus on adaptation, technologies, incentives, and exchanges.