The United Nations Counteracting Climate Change: Shifting from Wider to Narrow Angle -

The Role of UN Tax (Sub) Committee on Environmental Taxation

Abstract

The article aspires to capture the United Nations (UN) descend from the highlands of international cooperation frameworks on climate change to ploughlands of actual handholding and enabling developing countries to formulate policies to price carbon and other negative externalities through the mechanism of environmental taxation. It starts off with a broader overview of the UN’s pandering towards stitching together and adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the subsequent commitments by the comity of nations that flowed therefrom – Kyoto Protocol 1997, Paris Agreement 2015, and Glasgow Pact 2021. The article then narrows down its focus to the UN’s preference for carbon pricing and environmental taxes towards fighting climate change in developing countries by optimizing the pre-existing structure of the UN Tax Committee. The extensive appraisal of the UN Tax (Sub) Committee on Environmental Taxes 2017-21, and 2021-25 and their work are undertaken as the main thrust of the article. The scarlet thread of the article is that it is an extremely important initiative in that it heralds a definite shift in UN’s approach to environmental degradation, and if leveraged adequately, it can have significant impact on the international community’s efforts towards fighting carbonization and abating climate change.