The purpose of this paper is to survey the current international climate negotiations and to outline the areas that may be of material interest to national environmental regulators ahead of December’s United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Taken together, environmental regulators represent a heterogeneous grouping: they are of diverse institutional character and have very different statutory roles and responsibilities, in line with their domestic contexts and according to national environmental priorities. Whether acting as part of the executive branch of government or semi‐independent agencies with legislative authority to perform governmental functions, regulators have collectively witnessed an expansion in their remit as climate change has moved up the political agenda.
The implementation of a post‐2012 global climate change agreement is therefore likely to provide new and greater regulatory opportunities. These include opportunities relating to the implementation and evaluation of domestic mitigation policies and measures, overseeing projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), managing emissions trading schemes and undertaking climate adaptation planning – all of which will assume unprecedented international importance. Furthermore, any substantive outcome from Copenhagen is likely to have implications for national regulators as governments are required to measure, report and enable verification of those factors that pertain to what has been agreed.
This paper will analyse in detail the Bali Action Plan’s (BAP) call for measurable, reportable and verifiable (MRV) mitigation commitments, actions and support and what this concept might mean for the work of environmental regulators. While the debate on MRV is ongoing and the agreed framework and mechanisms for MRV remain inconclusive, comprehensive measuring and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions will be necessary if Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are to convince each other that their mitigation efforts are accountable and comparable, in line with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ enshrined in the UNFCCC. MRV can also build recognition of non‐credited national mitigation actions, provide a means to assess the effectiveness of policies and measures, measure Parties’ progress against the objectives of the Convention, and identify areas for future mitigation potential (Ellis and Moarif 2009).
