Compliance with the Climate Change Convention

Compliance with the Climate Change Convention is a necessary step to avoid the impacts of accelerated climate change through the enhanced greenhouse effect. The political and economic factors influencing compliance are numerous. Two are focused on here. Firstly, the process by which international agreements are translated to action through becoming national programmes is important. For the U.K. and other EU members, compliance is inextricably linked to its responsibilities within the European Union. Secondly, joint implementation of the Convention through bilateral offsets is discussed. Emissions related to biological sources such as from forestry, agriculture and land use, the scientific uncertainty in their measurement, and the skewed distribution of their sources to developing countries, ensure that joint implementation which entails offsets of these emissions through sink enhancement is unlikely to be a major part of global strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, due to transactions costs and to disputes over equity in resource use.