Climate Law Targets: Governance, Temporality and Administrative Law

The paper explores climate targets and temporality. The first part analyses key regulatory and governance issues around climate change targets, focusing in particular on the complications which time introduces. Questions it asks include how far into the future should climate targets be set and how does time affect ambition? The second part examines climate targets through an administrative law accountability lens. Again, temporal aspects are placed front and centre. The paper considers what role time should play in ex ante accountability for climate targets and also how time works to complicate issues of ex post accountability. Should all targets (both short- and long-term) be binding, or do we thereby end up with a ‘dictatorship of climate law’? What role does political accountability play alongside legal accountability? In analysing the latter, the paper explores a number of recent judicial review challenges to climate targets and assesses the way in which time inevitably features in such cases.