Evaluating the Paris Agreement within the Context of the Three-Tenet Framework of Energy Justice

The Paris Agreement of 2016 was the culmination of decades of various efforts at mitigation, adaptation and resilience to the impacts of climate change. The Paris Agreement requires party states to take measurable steps not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also to build resilience to adapt to the increasing and devastating impacts of climate change, such as global warming, coastal erosion and tidal waves. Although the Paris Agreement derives its source from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), it builds on the achievement of previous meetings of the Conference of the Parties in Kyoto, Cancun and Durban. This notwithstanding, the Paris Agreement is also a far cry from them. Under the Paris Agreement, developing, least developed and small island states, and developed countries are encouraged to take steps to reduce emissions and build systems that adapt to the consequences of climate change. In this analysis, this article, which is descriptive and analytical, adopts the traditional three-tenet framework of energy justice: distributional, recognition and procedural justice to assess whether the Paris Agreement in its current state reflects these three tenets when applied to developed, developing, least developed and small island states.