The Motivation of Climate Action Through Free Trade Agreements: What Does the AfCFTA Agreement bring to the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change

Global climate change mitigation within the framework of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change essentially revolves around a hybrid of bottom up and top-down state action. However, regional climate action in Africa is not entirely defined by the Paris Agreement due to inevitable intersections with actions directed towards the organisation of trade within a state, as well as multilateral cooperation with other states in regional trade agreements. The widely acknowledged implication of this intersection between regional trade governance and climate change mitigation is that regional free trade agreements like the 2020 Africa Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA Agreement) have the potential to advance or hinder climate mitigation objectives within a particular construct. In addition to the foregoing understanding on the connections between trade governance and climate change, as well as the opportunities for harmonisation or conflict, there is an existing lack of clarity about the specific possibilities that the AfCFTA Agreement brings to the climate change objectives of the Paris Agreement. This article, therefore, explores how climate action can be adequately motivated through regional trade agreements, using the novel interaction between the AfCFTA Agreement, which came into effect in January 2021, and the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. It examines the implications of trade governance for climate policy under the AfCFTA framework, and how those outcomes align with and promote the objectives of the Paris Agreement. By focussing on the intersection between climate change and regional trade agreements, the contribution of this article to scholarship is the elaboration of the burgeoning practice of motivating climate action through regional trade agreements within the context of the novel interaction between the AfCFTA Agreement and the Paris Agreement.