POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Treaty, Irreversible Process, Precautionary Principle
Document Summary
Precautionary principle: in terms of governance, a further complicating factor is the long timescale and thus irreversibility (in a human timeframe) of many of the tipping elements in the climate system. Once a tipping point has been crossed, there is no way for humanity to reverse the change, no matter how deleterious or even catastrophic the new behavior of the climate system might be. This feature of the climate system argues for a careful application of the precautionary principle. Universal participation: two key principles were already in place that shaped the trajectory of the negotiations in important ways. The rst of these was universal participation, the idea that all states should have a voice and role in the negotiations over a global problem like climate change. From the beginning of the 1990s, the multilateral approach along with the concomitant principles of universal participation and cbdr were conceived of as the way to govern climate change.
