| 英文摘要 |
Paris Agreement has been identified as embracing a bottom-up approach within the international climate change legal regime. Meanwhile, emissions trading systems at all level began to envisage, or even to implement linkage for economic and environmental reasons around mid-2000. Linking refers to the phenomenon where one country’s allowance can be used, directly or indirectly, by a participant in another country’s scheme for compliance purposes. Apart from the more traditional approach of linking, World Bank and a group of researchers, at around the time when the Paris Agreement was being negotiated and about to be concluded, have proposed new types of linking for the purpose of creating a global carbon market. In comparison to the more bottom-up traditional linking approaches, these new initiatives try to introduce a certain top-down institutional design. Does this mean that the regulatory trend introduced by the Paris Agreement is inapplicable in the practices of linking emissions trading systems? This is the central research question this article seeks to explore. This article will first introduce the concept of linking, as well as the legal elements of executing a linkage. New initiatives for linking will then be discussed for the purpose of identifying any observable trend in the regulatory approach. The article will proceeds to resent two elements of the Paris Agreement that clearly demonstrates its bottom-up regulatory approach: the nationally determined contributions and cooperative approach under Article 6. Based on these findings, the article will analyze the implication of the Paris Agreement to the policy tool of linking. The article finds that current practices of linking often takes place between emissions trading systems that operate at the regional or subnational level, instead of national level. On the other hand, Paris Agreement, as an international treaty, is still a country-driven process. Thus, the level of “bottom” actually refers to different concept in the practice of linking. As a result, the Paris Agreement might play a very limited role in encourage the regulatory development of linking, especially at the regional or subnational level. Nevertheless, the cooperative approach under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement might have more positive impact on linking emissions trading systems that operate at the national level, depending on the final rules regarding its operation. |
