The 2014 Amsterdam Conference “Beyond 2015: Exploring the Future of Global Climate Governance” will be held on 20 November 2014 at De Rode Hoed, Amsterdam. The Conference is organized by the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), VU University Amsterdam, as part of the Indian-European Multi-level Climate Governance Research Network (IECGN).
The international community is currently not on track to meet its global climate change mitigation targets. The emissions gap between the greenhouse gas reduction pledges made by countries party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the mitigation pathway necessary to limit climate change within the range of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is widening. Acknowledging the need to close this ambition gap, policy makers and academics are discussing alternative measures beyond the top-down, state-dominated targets and timetables approach. Referred to in the academic literature as, inter alia, transnational climate governance initiatives, international cooperative initiatives, climate clubs and networked climate governance, alternative climate governance arrangements are increasingly advocated as concrete solutions to the growing ambitions gap. In addition, debate focus on the most effective and political feasible set-up for an international climate change agreement to emerge from Paris in 2015.
Against this background, the conference discusses available options for effective and legitimate climate change governance, both with the formal framework of the UNFCCC and beyond.
The conference is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in partnership with Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) as part of the research grant awarded in 2012-2015 to the Indian-European Multi-level Climate Governance Research Network (IECGN) research partners.
For more information, conference theme and timeline, please click here.
For the full programme, please see attached PDF.