Assessing regional climate leadership

Since the end of the 1st Kyoto period in 2012, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and ratifying countries have struggled to determine a post Kyoto framework. While ongoing negotiations are being held for a post-2020 regime, there is a need to acknowledge a number of issues emerging from the first commitment period [1997-2012] (Aldy and Stavins 2008; Macintosh 2012; EPRS, 2015; and Jacoby et al 2015). These include the need to develop a differentiated framework of action between developed and developing countries, and the feasibility and capability gap between developed and developing countries in terms of mitigation and adaptation actions (OECD 2012; UN 2013; and Pauw et al 2015). This paper argues that there is a need to build strong governance for facilitating more cooperative climate action between developed and developing countries at the regional level. Our focus in this paper is on developing a notion of regional climate leadership that we will then apply, in subsequent research, to an analysis of neighbouring countries within the East Asian-Pacific [the EAP region]