Recorded on March 23, 2022.

Timothy A. Gelatt Dialogue on the Rule of Law in East Asia: Climate Change in Asia-Pacific

Panel 1: Climate Governance and the Rule of Law

This event was on March 23, 2022

This event was co-sponsored by the APEC Study Center at Columbia University.

Post-event Summary

Rising temperatures across our planet pose a massive governance challenge. We opened our four-part 2022 Gelatt Dialogue with a high-level appraisal of the international mechanisms intended to drive a collective response and the interplay between international and domestic climate advocacy. International coordination on climate change began 30 years ago with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since then, nations have convened repeatedly to establish rules and set targets for reducing greenhouse emissions. The U.S.-Asia Institute’s Executive Director Katherine Wilhelm moderated the discussion.

Oran Young, professor emeritus at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara and a leader in the field of environmental governance, said the pursuit of internationally legally binding agreements has been “to put it as positively as possible, highly disappointing.” He said: “We need to be actively exploring the widest possible range of processes and mechanisms. We are in a situation where the climate problem is now a very real climate emergency.” Professor Young found grounds for hope in the proliferation of discussions, deals, and pledges by subsets of countries on the sidelines of the periodic COP meetings, the “conferences of parties” to the UNFCCC. He highlighted the Global Methane Pledge launched at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021 as one example. “People say pledges are kind of weak. Well, in some circumstances pledges do make a differences. Sometimes people internalize pledges.”

Jacqueline Peel, a professor at Melbourne Law School and director of the University of Melbourne’s multidisciplinary climate initiative, Melbourne Climate Futures, said peer pressure from other countries helped push Australia’s government to pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. “That was important in the domestic political process to have that international pressure, and the continual cycle of the COPs provides a point for those national conversations to occur.” She also said small states such as the Pacific Island states have been able to collectively voice their concerns through the UN COP process in a way that probably wouldn’t occur in smaller forums.

Navroz Dubash, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi who has studied the interplay between international climate processes and domestic action, responded to Professor Peel: “The fact that the international process has helped to nudge politics in Australia is wonderful but I think it really is because there probably are Australian constituencies that used that pressure effectively. You can’t bypass domestic politics. You have to find ways of working within domestic politics.” Like Peel, he said the most important role of the pledge process is in stimulating domestic conversations. “When India, for example, put out its nationally determined contribution, it led to a whole conversation … about whether and how we meet these things.”

Tabitha Mallory, CEO of the consulting firm China Ocean Institute and an affiliate faculty member of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, suggested that the COP discussion process also may help change in how world leaders and other actors think about climate problems. “I don’t think we have enough of the kind of thinking yet that is thinking we’re all in this together. We are not going to get solutions to climate change without addressing some of that fundamental thinking.”

By Katherine Wilhelm

About the speakers

Navroz K. Dubash is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, where he conducts research and writes about climate change, energy, air pollution, water policy, and the politics of regulation in the developing world. Navroz has been engaged in the climate debate as a scholar, policy adviser and activist for 25 years. He was instrumental in establishing the global Climate Action Network in 1990. He is a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Sixth Assessment), advises the UNEP Emissions Gap Report Steering Committee, and has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit. Navroz has been a member of the group that developed India’s Low Carbon Strategy for Inclusive Growth and the Committee for a Long Term Strategy for Low Carbon Development for India; he continues to serve on advisory committees on energy, water and air pollution. In 2015, he was conferred the 12th TN Khoshoo Memorial Award for his work on Indian and global climate change governance. Navroz has published two authored books, ten edited or co-edited books or special issues of journals, and more than seventy journal articles and book chapters.

Tabitha Grace Mallory is an affiliate faculty member of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and specializes in Chinese foreign and environmental policy. She is currently conducting research on China and global ocean governance and has published work on China’s fisheries and oceans policy. Dr. Mallory also is CEO of the consulting firm China Ocean Institute and has consulted for organizations such as the United Nations Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). She previously served as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, and has also worked for The National Bureau of Asian Research and the US government. Dr. Mallory holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) and an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a certificate from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, and a B.A. in international studies and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Washington. She serves on the board of directors of the China Club of Seattle, and is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the Washington State China Relations Council.

Jacqueline Peel is a professor at Melbourne Law School and director of the University of Melbourne’s multidisciplinary climate initiative, Melbourne Climate Futures. Professor Peel is an expert in international environmental and climate law, with extensive writings also on how international law affects domestic environmental regulation, including on questions of multilevel governance and climate litigation. She is a co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s Signature Initiative on Climate Change and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III contribution to its Sixth Assessment Report. She is the author or co-author of several books including The Role of International Environmental Law in Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Litigation: Regulatory Pathways to Cleaner Energy, Australian Climate Law in a Global Context, Principles of International Environmental Law, Environmental Law: Scientific, Policy and Regulatory Dimensions, and Science and Risk Regulation in International Law. In 2017, she co-founded the Women's Energy and Climate Law Network with the aim of fostering greater involvement of women in areas of energy and climate law-related scholarship and practice.

Ye Qi is a professor of public policy and director of the Institute of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to joining HKUST in January 2019, he was the Cheung Kong Professor of Environmental Policy and Management at Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management, and the Volkswagen Professor of Sustainability at Schwarzman College. From April 2014 to January 2019, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. He was appointed as Cheung Kong Professor of Environmental Science at Beijing Normal University from 2002-2005. Before returning to China in 2003, he taught ecosystem management and climate change science at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley from 1996 through 2003. Ye Qi received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science in 1994 jointly awarded by the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Syracuse University. He has published numerous articles about China’s climate change and energy policies.

Oran Young is a renowned Arctic expert and a world leader in the fields of international governance and environmental institutions. He is a distinguished professor emeritus at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. His scientific work encompasses both basic research focusing on collective choice and social institutions and applied research dealing with issues pertaining to international environmental governance and the Arctic as an international region. Among the more than 20 books he has authored are Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene, On Environmental Governance: Sustainability, Efficiency, and Equity, The Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change and Governance in World Affairs, and Institutional Dynamics: Emergent Patterns in International Environmental Governance. Dr. Young is founding chair of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change of the US National Academy of Sciences, chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, founding co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, and from 2005 to 2010 the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change.