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The current international climate change regime is characterized by the existence of plenty of international rules and treaties that represent the outcome of the global negotiations which took place in the last decade between the different states with the hope of unifying the efforts for facing global warming. However, such situation resulted in the fragmentation of the international regulations dealing with the issue of climate change because of several factors that are either related to the huge complexity surrounding this topic which requires the adoption of extremely sophisticated rules over a long period of time or the atmosphere surrounding the period in which for instance the Conference of the Parties (COPs) is taking place and whether there is a possibility of adopting ambitious plans at that period or whether only a general declaration was available because of the lack of consensus between the different negotiating parties. As such, one could understand why there is a fragmentation of the international rules governing climate change. In the chapter “Soft, Complex, and Fragmented International Climate Change Practice: What Implications for International Trade Law,” the authors Francesco Sindico and Julie Gibson examined this issue while emphasizing on several important points in this regard. First, fragmentation is the result of the existence of highly sophisticated rules that had to be enacted by the international community to deal with mitigation, adaptation, technology transfer … and so on. However, in this case, there is a single mechanism that is currently handling all the legal framework that is dealing with all these issues. This mechanism is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Moreover, the current fragmentation is also the result of the failure of reaching an agreement post-2012 in the international arena which led the different actors to enact regional, multilateral, and bilateral climate change agreements. For instance, the European Union (EU) have started adopting unilateral agreements and measures using hard law mechanisms and establishing commitments in order to influence the domestic climate change policies in different countries in particular in countries looking to have commercial relations with the Union. One could also mention the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate which was established between Canada, Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United States (US). This partnership aims at focusing on “projects concerning specific carbon-intensive sectors such as steel, cement, coal mining, or aluminum.” Fragmentation is also caused because of the existence of different domestic climate change policies that are not only focusing on dealing with global warming but also has to take into consideration other factors such as economic development and where climate change topic is rather framed as an energy security issue. This is the case of the US for instance where green energy is being viewed as a means for restoring the economy and creating new jobs. It is also seen as a way to reduce dependency on fossil fuels from unstable regions and changing the geopolitical landscape in favor of the US. Thus, these factors must be dealt with to solve the issue of fragmentation of the climate change regime.
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