Expensive?

The usual remedies at International Law are: (1) Reciprocity, whereby an injured state seeks to inconvenience or damage an alleged transgressor – for example, if in a trade dispute one state contrary to a treaty imposes high tariffs on another, the latter would do likewise in return; (2) Collective Action, whereby several states
collaborate to enforce compliance, e.g. via economic sanctions or even warfare; and (3) Shaming, whereby public statements are made to “name and shame” an alleged transgressor.

Only the last of these seems likely, in practice, to be appropriate to a climate treaty – but even that would be ineffective if the alleged transgressor, especially if it were a powerful country, simply didn’t care or took no notice – e.g. note how so many countries seem impervious to allegations of human rights abuse.

So effective enforcement of a climate treaty would seem to be close to impossible. In any case, it’s hard to see how it would be feasible to establish the worldwide regulatory and inspection regime essential for equitable and effective monitoring and verification of compliance. And of course any such treaty that incorporated vague or meaningless words such as “target”, “objective”, “ambition”, “intention” and “hope” could not be enforced anyway. Indeed any ambiguity or lack of clarity in the wording of a treaty is in practice likely to vitiate its enforcement.

In my view, this hard, practical and vitally important problem is too easily and too often ignored in the context of climate negotiations.