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The purpose of this study is to evaluate to what extent the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have supported (or could support) the least developed countries (LDCs) particularly for accessing the climate technologies and thereby to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

This study adopted legal dogmatism to evaluate the gradual development of technology transfer issues to support the LDCs under the international climate regime.

This study suggested a few potential measures to facilitate meaningful technology transfer to LDCs – such as clarifying and linking the role of the technology and financial mechanism, a more robust role of capacity building, using the sustainable development mechanism with a technology transfer focus, improving the transparency and reporting mechanism to particularly indicate support regarding technology transfer requested and received by the LDCs linking it with the nationally determined contributions, and adapting a pragmatic approach to intellectual property.

This study is an original contribution as it identified concern over technology transfer under the UNFCCC since 1992 with a focus on the LDCs and indicated required actions that need to be taken to support the LDCs in the context of climate-related technology transfer and beyond.

This chapter explains how the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an important achievement of the Rio Earth Summit held in 1992, instigated interest in, and enthusiasm for, the fight against climate change in the international arena, promoting national actions, creating common frameworks and motivating corporations to take action against climate change. The Convention recognised climate change as a problem in 1994 when the UNFCCC took effect, which was remarkable considering that there was much less scientific evidence available at that time. Through extensive literature review, this chapter presents the origin and content of the Convention and explains how it creates new international instruments for mitigating climate change, its impact on corporate climate change-related accountability practices and where it stands now after 20 years in operation. The researcher argues that there is a need for strong cooperation among national and international actors such as governments, companies, national and international non-governmental organisations and international governmental organisations in order to create climate change-related accountability.

Although the general theory of greenhouse warming has been understood by scientists since the end of the nineteenth century, an international regime to address the problem of climate change began to develop only in the late 1980s.¹ In the decade and a half since then, the regime has undergone a remarkable evolution. In 1992, states adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which took effect in 1994 and serves as the “constitution” for the international climate change regime.² In 1997, the UNFCCC was supplemented by the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrialized countries to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect (so-called “greenhouse gases” or GHGs for short). And the 2001 Marrakesh Accords further elaborate the Kyoto Protocol's regulatory regime, setting forth detailed rules for how the Kyoto Protocol will operate.

The world is facing global challenges that require international collaboration. This study aims to describe and analyze how digital technologies are applied in global governance to respond to such critical challenges.

The authors apply an interpretive case study of climate reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a case of digitalization in global governance. It includes interviews with officials in the Swedish public administration and the UNFCCC secretariat to cover national and international levels. The authors describe the reporting process and analyze the role of information systems through the lens of information infrastructures.

“Information infrastructure” is a valuable instrument to understand digitalization in global governance as a complex interplay between information systems, information, standards, organizations, people and social structures. The level of sophistication is, however, basic with a large potential for improvement – for instance in analytical and communicative services to support evidence-based decision-making and assessment of progress.

The data collection is limited to one governance process: reporting. Future studies should complement the findings by broadening the scope to other processes. The authors propose that digital global governance is dependent on an effective information infrastructure, and that the five design principles by Hanseth and Lyytinen (2016) offer guidance when developing this.

The results indicate a large unutilized potential of digital technologies to improve progress assessment, communicate more effectively with stakeholders and identify new ways of visualizing data to support decision making in global climate policy.

Use of digital technologies, as suggested in the article, could strengthen the implementation capability of climate goals, which is of urgent need.

While most research in digital governance considers the national or municipal level, this study provides empirical insight and theorization of digital technologies in a global governance setting.

This paper brings insights from accounting scholarship to the measurement and reporting challenges of metagovernance approaches to sustainable development. Where scholarship on metagovernance—the combination of market, hierarchical and network governance—proposes deductive approaches to such challenges, we contend that a historically informed “abductive” approach offers valuable insight into the realpolitik of intergovernmental frameworks.

The paper adopts a Foucauldian “archaeological–genealogical” method to investigate the inclusion of climate change as a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). It analyses more than 100 documents and texts, tracking the statement forms that crystallise prevailing truth claims across the development of climate and SDG metagovernance.

We show how the truth claims now enshrined in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change constrained the conceptualisation and operationalisation of SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The paper thereby reframes recent measurement and reporting challenges as outcomes of conceptual conflicts between the technicist emphasis of divisions within the United Nations and the truth claims enshrined in intergovernmental agreements.

This paper demonstrates how an archaeological–genealogical approach may start to address the measurement and reporting challenges facing climate and SDG metagovernance. It also highlights that the two degrees target on climate change has a manifest variability of interpretation and shows how this characteristic has become pivotal to operationalising climate metagovernance in a manner that respects the sovereignty of developing nations.

This paper aims to critically evaluate the working of the clean development mechanism (CDM) particularly in developing and least developed countries in the light of recent developments.

Part I of the paper delves upon various international rules governing the CDM. Part II of the paper draws out the rationale behind the introduction of the CDM under the Kyoto Protocol so as to provide a basis for its critical assessment in actual practice, as dealt with in Part III. Finally, the paper makes a concluding remark and suggests a way forward.

It is submitted that the CDM suffers from a gamut of concerns, which need to be adequately addressed. The business-centric approach followed by the investors of CDM projects has been a major reason behind denial of social, economic and environmental benefits pertinent for attaining sustainable development in the developing countries. The urge to derive economic benefits resulting from their investment has made the developing countries more competitive but turn a blind eye to reduced standards maintained for sustainable development. Besides, long-term benefits arising out of such projects, along with greater public participation of local stakeholders in CDM activities, have usually taken a backseat. A need is there to involve the CDM in the agricultural sector, which would have long-term benefits. Besides, it is required to enhance local stakeholder consultation, which ensures that people affected by a CDM project can give a timely, meaningful input to a proposed project. In the 80th meeting of the CDM Executive Board, held in Bonn, it was further decided that the complaints of the local stakeholders shall be given effect through subsequent changes in the project design of the CDM pipeline, along with their consultation before the real start of the project. Greater participation will also be ensured through increased publically available data on CDM projects.

The paper is original and brings out some valuable suggestions to improve the working of the CDM.

Climate change is projected to bring a range of changes in temperature, precipitation patterns, and sea level. As a result, widespread occurrence of floods, cyclones, droughts, cold and heat waves, etc. are projected with uneven distribution in time and spatial scales (Rosenzweig et al., 2007). These changes can manifest in the form of long-term slow changes in the mean state of the climate and sudden changes in the extremes of the climate (Carter et al., 2007). The sudden severe changes can have high impacts with widespread devastation, severely impacting years of developmental efforts in many vulnerable countries.

Climate change was identified as an urgent global problem that requires governments to unite their efforts to prepare for potential climate risks at the First World Climate Conference in 1979. This recognition led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to assess the magnitude and timing of changes and estimate their impacts. The IPCC published its First Assessment Report in 1990, which became a basis for negotiations on a climate change convention under the United Nations General Assembly. Between February 1991 and May 1992, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change met five times under the auspices of the General Assembly, and the Convention text was adopted on May 9, 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where 154 states signed. The Convention entered into force on March 21, 1994. It has near universal membership with 194 Parties (member countries) having ratified (UNFCCC, 2006).

The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the Ethiopia’s climate change adaptation and mitigation regulatory frameworks and their congruency with the guiding principles under the United Nations (UN) Climate Convention, to show the alignment of the regulatory frameworks with the UN Climate Change rules. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall distribution, recurrent droughts and floods require robust climate change mitigation and adaptation policies and effective implementation in the country.

Through the doctrinal legal research method, the author has used a detailed analysis of primary sources, both national and international legislative enactments. Besides, the research has benefitted from secondary sources like research reports, online publications, scientific journals, international reports, books and journal articles.

The findings reveal that in Ethiopia, there is no national climate change-specific policy and legislation. Although there are scattered sectoral climate-related policies and strategies, they are not consistent with the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This study argues that having comprehensive specific climate change policy and legislative frameworks consistent with UNFCCC guiding principles could help to mitigate and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change in the country.

The impact of climate disasters (e.g., floods, storms, or landslides), which are generally of low intensity and high frequency, should not be overlooked in developing countries. Global experiences related to the damage due to these disasters indicate that such events can be devastating in communities that are vulnerable to hazardous impacts. Cumulative effects of climate disasters are a sign of a potential catastrophe. Moreover, the recent increase in these events poses additional issues that increase the cost of local public administration, including emergency operation and infrastructure recovery. This chapter explains key problems related to climate disasters that are increasing, particularly in the local area of developing countries, and clarifies the need to incorporate climate disaster risk reduction into public development planning and practice. The chapter also provides descriptions of the research location, approaches of the study, and the structure of this book.