Cancun’s paradigm shift and COP 21: to go beyond rhetoric

Abstract : This foreword explains why the success of COP21 is dependent upon its capacity to operate the paradigm shift announced in Cancun. It comes back to the recent history of the Conference of the Parties and shows the reasons for the emergence of the notion of ‘equitable rights to sustainable development (EASD)’ which enlarged the concept of equity beyond ‘burden sharing’. It shows why this paradigm shift is a categorical imperative to break the self-defeating process of negotiations since the first COP of Berlin in 1995. It then demonstrate how the contributions to this special issue a) help understanding the deadlocks of a ‘sharing the pie’ logic in the climate affair and why it is inappropriate and diversionary to assess climate justice through ‘fairness’ of emissions allocations as the sole criteria b) show how to enforce the EADS principle in the current adverse context of a world economy weakened in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.