The Changing Pattern of the North-South Dimension in Climate Negotiations: Consequences for Legal Aspects of Decisions

The climate negotiations are the most ambitious multilateral effort so far to craft new international law on a central issue related to sustainable development. The negotiations for the Convention began in February 1991, in parallel with the preparations for the UN Conference on Environment and Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Negotiations were concluded in May 1992, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force in 1994. The Durban language is part of the North-South divide, which has played a central role in all negotiations on sustainable development since the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm 1972. The main spokesperson for the South at that time was Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who strongly underlined that the first priority of developing countries was not the environment, but poverty and its alleviation, which has been a central theme in environmental negotiations ever since. This paper aims to follow this problem in more detail through the various phases of the climate negotiations, and consider its legal consequences.