파리기후변화협약체제와 온실가스 감축목표의 이행

The purpose of this Article is to discuss the essential elements of the Paris Agreement and its implementing Paris Rulebook, which in fact repealed the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to predict the possibility of the Agreement’s success. It also examines controversial design issues concerning the market-based mechanisms under the Paris Agreement that consist of cooperative approaches and sustainable development mechanisms. The characteristics of the Paris Agreement can be summarized as follows: (i) ambitious goals and the ambitious cycle; (ii) a bottom-up approach, which allows individual countries voluntarily to set abatement goals and establish implementation plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs); (iii) its process-based character, which means that the Agreement does not imposed upon parties a legal duty to reduce greenhouse gases, while the transparency framework is primarily designed to guarantee its effectiveness, promoting comparability and accountability with detailed information about NDCs and greenhouse gas inventories that parties are obliged to provide periodically; and (v) its differentitation between developed and developing countries on a case-by-case basis, not categorically. Therefore, its success depends in large part upon the effectiveness of the transparency framework whose details are to be finalized by the Paris Rulebook. The Paris Rulebook reinforces the strengths of the transparency framework by making detailed rules on clarity, transparency and understanding of NDCs and biennial national reports on greenhouse gas inventories. It aims to standardize NDCs and related information, and requires in fact the adoption of IPCC guidelines on methodologies and common metrics in calculating emissions and sinks. Overall, the Paris Rulebook is a great achievement in that it provides institutional bases. The Paris Rulebook has its limits, however. Its failure to standardize NDC features, implementation periods, scope and coverage, and the like weakens the effectiveness of the transparency framework. Moreover, the scope of technical expert review and the compliance and implementation mechanism is limited only to violations of procedural obligations. These weaknesses originate in the above-mentioned Agreement’s paradigm: its process-based, bottom-up approach. Finally, parties to the Paris Agreement have yet to agree upon guiding principles and accounting rules with regard to market-based mechanisms. To succeed, the new Paris climate change regime needs to strengthen the transparency framework with increasing the level of accountability.