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Extract from: Climate Protection Agreements

Petra Minnerop’s article for the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law details new, and heartening, developments in the legal approach to multilateral environmental protection.

Scientific Background and Legal Origins of Climate Protection

In the 1980s, scientists started to use new methods to prove how changes in the CO₂ concentration influence the occurrence of ice-ages and weather events. Drillings into the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps revealed not only that levels of CO₂ were 50% less during ice-ages than at the warmer times, but also that levels of CO₂ went up in close relation to the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (‘IPCC’) was created with the mandate to assess scientific evidence in relation to climate change. Read the full article.

Image credit: Alexander Hafemann, public domain CCO via Unsplash.