March 2004 RM Journal
The Kyoto Protocol Compliance Regime: Origins, Outcomes and the Amendment Dilemma
Compliance is one of the central, and thorniest questions currently challenging international environmental law. As many commentators observe, attention has shifted from negotiating multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) - there are over 500 MEAs on the books, to focusing on ensuring compliance with existing commitments.1 A notable feature of this increased attention to compliance is the emergence of treaty specific compliance regimes; the compliance regime for the Kyoto Protocol is the latest and most innovative in this trend. Wirth comments that, “[t]he Kyoto compliance regime is unprecedented in the environmental field and, more generally, breaks considerable ground in international law and practices.”
