Climate Change: the Limits and Responsibilities of Paris Agreement and Glocal Environmental Perspectives

Abstract

Nowadays we live in a chaotic world where it is hard to orient, but we are increasingly surrounded by issues which require stable landmarks. Among these issues, climate change is certainly one of the most important and asks us for much attention. It is fundamental to act on several levels: international, regional and local. The interaction between these three levels is not obvious, linking global and local levels represents a challenge for decision making on climate change. Indeed, the fight against climate change is no longer simply a matter of emissions and distribution of efforts, but also of technology, economic and social choices, a new vision of the future. The issue of climate change is related to economic transition and it does not concerns only negotiations between technicians of environmental policy. Starting from this point I would like to explain the limits and responsibilities of Paris Agreement today and in the future. What position the countries have in this international treaty and how the multi-level governance works. How the countries have prepared their INDC’s and what is the process to reach the international goals in the different scale of our society, local, regional, national and international. In addition, I will analyse if today there could be an international governance without a stable trans-scale framework to face the problem of climate change and what role the nation-states have in this framework. The Paris agreement could reach its goals if it was seen as the beginning of a process where all are involved, with the awareness that climate change is a global problem, but first of all concerns the individual and his actions. Moreover, with the Paris agreement we could see a new gap opening up between the stated objective and the action proposed. Indeed, the meeting has been prepared at the highest levels of the planet’s governments, but only a rigorous planning at local and regional level could make the agreement effective on the international scale. Only in this way we could reasonably face an issue that is Global as much as Local.