Might Cooperative Approaches Not Be So Cooperative? Exploring the Potential of Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement to Generate Legal Disputes

With Article 6.2, the Paris Agreement offers its parties the possibility to engage in cooperative approaches to import mitigation outcomes that have been generated on the territory of another party and use these international transferred mitigation outcomes (itmos) for compliance purposes. While this possibility seems to pave the way to more—and presumably new forms of—climate cooperation outside the UN climate regime, this paper asks whether Article 6.2 is also likely to spark disagreement among states. It is suggested that it bears as much a potential to generate cooperation as to generate conflict. To illustrate that point, the paper explains how Article 6.2 could lead to conflict between developed and developing states over the legality of unilateral restrictions on the admittance of itmos and discusses what such conflict may look like, as well as its possible legal and political implications.