Adaptation to Climate Change in the International Climate Change Regime: Challenges and Responses

Abstract

In international law, a regime includes the entirety of rules and practices within one or several interrelated international treaties (Verheyan 2002). The climate change regime, for the purpose of this chapter, has been connoted as the collection of principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures in international climate change negotiations (Paavola and Adger 2006, see also Krasner 1982; Young 1994). This regime basically has emerged in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992 which provides a framework in international law for mitigation as well as adaption as climate response strategy. The term ‘adaptation’, though widely used in climate change agenda, is generally considered as an underdeveloped part of the legal regime of climate change (Linnerooth-Bayer and Meckler 2006). This is because, till date, international climate discourse is mainly focused on mitigation policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for addressing climate change impacts. In that respect, the developed countries agreed, under Article 3.1 of the Kyoto Protocol, for emission reductions by at least 5 % from 1990 between 2008 and 2012. However, scientific research already proved that even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid severe impacts of climate change in the next few decades (Srinivasan 2006). Most alarmingly, several impacts of climate change have already been evident in many ecosystems and economic sectors as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Third Assessment Report (TAR). To cope with these consequences and moderate the impacts of climate change, adaptation as a policy has become prominent in recent climate discourses. These concerns drag the focus on legal aspects of adaptation in the international climate change regime.