Climate Rights and Obligations for Emerging States: The Cases of Brazil and South Africa

Global environmental governance has been strongly oriented around a North–South axis, with rights and obligations following the two sides of the divide. The climate change regime, in particular, stressed different obligations for a set of developed countries—those historically responsible for the GHG emissions that cause climate change—and countries that retained a right to continue developing without addressing their own emissions. The rise of a set of large, fast-growing economies in the first decade of the twenty-first century has challenged that framework. Both academic and political discourses have been divided between those that stress the ongoing historical responsibility of developed countries to undertake climate action and financing and those who see the emerging powers as developed enough to acquire their own obligations to act.