The Environmental Law and Governance Working Group is organising a discussion of a paper on agricultural emissions.
Agricultural emissions are quietly one of the world’s most important contributors to climate change. Responsible for roughly 13% of global emissions, the agricultural sector sits squarely in the crosshairs of every IPCC pathway compatible with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target and a low magnitude and duration of overshoot - yet international climate law has largely looked the other way. Countries’ NDCs and long-term strategies acknowledge agriculture as an important contributor to climate change in broad strokes, but rarely commit to specific reduction targets, and fewer still offer credible plans to meet them.
This paper is based on the fundamental question of why agricultural emissions remain so difficult to regulate, and what a more effective legal approach, attentive to characteristics of the agricultural sector that impede mitigation, could look like. These characteristics entail the fragmentation of functions attributed to the sector across different environmental treaties and the misallocation of reduction burdens between developed and developing states. Drawing on customary international law and IEL principles, the paper proposes a sectoral approach to agricultural emissions, a legal architecture tailored to the sector’s specific characteristics, enabling the sector’s contribution to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal and other mitigation objectives.
Sectoral approaches are not new to climate governance: they have shaped fossil fuel energy policy and found earlier expression within the climate regime itself. This paper asks what such an approach would look like if designed for agricultural emissions mitigation, identifying the most effective sectoral strategies to advance agricultural emissions reductions under the climate regime. The answer, it argues, centres on consumption-based frameworks which can address key mitigation barriers, enabling integration and fairer emissions burden-sharing between states, and should be prioritised within a sectoral approach for agricultural emissions mitigation. The paper sets out a concrete agenda for why consumption-based considerations should be at the heart of any serious international legal strategy for agricultural emissions mitigation.
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