At UN-sponsored climate talks in 2013, the Group of 77 (G77) developing countries, joined by China, walked out briefly in protest against the failure of rich countries to provide a ‘loss-and-damage mechanism’ that would compensate poor countries for the detrimental effects of climate change. At the same conference, Japan’s announcement that it would not meet its emissions goals brought widespread condemnation. These events reflected an intensification of the most persistent deadlock in climate negotiations since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed in 1992. Even an emissions-reduction deal reached between the United States and China in November 2014, with specific goals and targets, does not significantly alter the trajectories that each country had already been following – whatever the deal’s diplomatic value. As the deadlock continues, it is appropriate to consider whether, if states cannot cooperate to take action against climate change, they might begin to coerce one another to do so.

By ‘coercion’, we mean one party’s actual or threatened infliction of harm as a means of influencing another party to change its behaviour. While pressure and persuasion are normal parts of cooperative processes of conflict resolution, coercion is characterised by the imposition, or threat, of non-trivial harm. States commonly resort to coercive action in international politics for the purposes of pursuing national interests, enforcing international law and ensuring conformity with global norms. The purpose of this essay is to identify those factors – legal, political, economic, administrative and technical – that will affect the likelihood of the use of coercion to slow the pace of human-induced climate change, mainly involving reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Since coercion is usually met with some form of resistance, a greater use of coercive policies will presumably lead to a rise in international conflict (possibly, but not necessarily, armed or violent). While conflict arising from the consequences of climate change has been widely researched and debated, the likelihood of international conflict over its causes remains understudied.