What Role for China in the International Climate Regime

What role can and will China play in the “new” international climate regime, the regime that emerged after the adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015? It is impossible to address this question without going back to the “building blocks” of the regime that emerged at the beginning of the 90s. This paper thus discusses the evolution from the “old” climate regime – composed of two treaties: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC – 1992) and the Kyoto Protocol (1997) – to the “new” one, where these two texts are complemented by the Paris Agreement (2015). It then seeks to analyse the radical change in the Chinese strategy concerning the fight against climate change observed between 1990 – year of the first IPCC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – and 2015. In this second part, we also address the question of China’s role going forward after Washington’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement…