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The development of the climate change regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s rode a wave of environmental activity, which began in 1987 with the discovery of the stratospheric “ozone hole” and the publication of the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), and crested at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. 1 An earlier wave of international environmental activity, culminating in the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the establishment several years later of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), had tended to focus on local, acute, and relatively reversible forms of pollution—for example, oil spills and dumping of hazardous wastes at sea—by regulating particular pollutants. The more recent cycle of environmental activity has concerned longer-term, irreversible, global threats, such as depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, loss of biological diversity, and greenhouse warming (Clark 1989, 47; see also chapter 12 in this volume), and has focused not merely on environmental protection per se, but on the more general economic and social policies needed to achieve sustainable development. The development of the climate change regime until the conclusion of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 can usefully be divided into five periods: the foundational period, during which scientific concern about global warming developed; 2 the agenda-setting phase, from 1985 to 1988, when climate change was transformed from a scientific into a policy issue; 3 a prenegotiation period from 1988 to 1990, when …