탄소범죄의 관점에서 본 각국의 기후변화법상 탄소배출 감축 대응의 내용과 한계

Joseph Stiglitz, a renowned American economist, has warned that the climate crisis is akin to World War Ⅲ, demanding a bold response. The severity of the climate crisis has been likened to a wartime situation. To address this global challenge, the international community has adopted several agreements, including the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. The 2015 Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To effectively implement the Paris Agreement, countries around the world, including South Korea, are enacting climate change laws with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Despite international efforts, international agreements, and domestic legal responses to climate change, attempts to address the climate crisis by imposing criminal penalties for carbon crimes, a type of climate crime, have not received significant attention. This paper examines the key contents, implications, and limitations of climate change laws in various countries, including the Climate Change Act (UK), the Federal Climate Protection Act (Germany), the Climate and Resilience Act (France), the Global Warming Prevention Law and the Climate Change Adaptation Act (Japan), and the Carbon Neutrality Basic Act (South Korea), from the perspective of carbon crimes, a prominent type of climate crime. The review revealed a fundamental limitation in these laws: they lack enforceable provisions, such as fines or criminal penalties, to compel compliance when entities intentionally fail to meet reporting obligations on progress toward carbon emission reduction targets or fail to achieve voluntarily set reduction targets. Therefore, this paper concludes that it is necessary to enhance the enforceability of climate change laws in countries including South Korea by imposing specific and clear obligations on fossil fuel companies to reduce carbon emissions and by criminalizing acts such as intentionally increasing carbon emissions or intentionally violating carbon emission reduction obligations, thereby treating such acts as carbon crimes subject to criminal penalties.