O papel da soft law frente aos desafios das mudanças climáticas

Abstract

Since the second half of the 20th century, climate change concerns has reached the international environmental political agenda. Currently, the high levels of concentration of greenhouse gases and, as a result, the global warming, is one of the biggest challenges to the government decision makers. To control this situation States have looked for a better international regulation of the climate issue, but they haven’t used the traditional means to create rules of international law. They prefered to use instruments related to a phenomenon that is called soft law, which is an expression hard to define and which concept and limits are still under construction, but the basic idea is to set up a flexible regulation. For this reason, the present study aims to investigate the influence exercised by the soft law in the process of regulation of International Environmental Law related to the climate changes. In order to reach this objective were analyzed it main chatacteristics, the reasons that can lead to the use of soft law instruments and how it was inserted in the issue of climate change by the study of the two most important international meetings in history focused on the environment – Estocolmo-72 and Rio de Janeiro-92. On the meeting helded in Rio de Janeiro, it was created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a typical exemple of this new normative engineering and known as the main international regulatory instrument of the climate changes. Afterwards, this study analysed three important results of the UNFCCC: the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Brazilian National Plan on Climate Change, to check the real contribution of soft law to the climate change regulation. By using the method of deductive approach, the historical, comparative and monographic methods of proceeding and, finally, the execution of research literature and documentary, it was possible to confirm that the role of soft law on climate change challenges was not just symbolical. Although it did not have the growth desired by many environmentalists, it yielded relevant results to themes related to the international climate change regulation.