Introduction

This issue of Global Environmental Politics brings together a wide array of articles on topics central to the study of global environmental politics, that range from the importance of international environmental agreements and transparency to climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The issue begins with a fascinating and frightening forum article by Sarah M. Jordaan, Afreen Siddiqi, William Kakenmaster, and Alice C. Hill, titled “The Climate Vulnerabilities of Global Nuclear Power.” Most discussions of nuclear power and climate change involve the debate over the positives of nuclear power as a lowgreenhouse-gas energy source versus the negatives of nuclear waste. This forum, however, delves into a more troubling relationship—the impact of climate change on nuclear power—detailing the threats to nuclear power facilities from climate change impacts like heat waves and sea level rise. These threats demand more and better international cooperation and standards around nuclear plants, but they have emerged at a nadir of global cooperative efforts around nuclear energy. This forum lays out the challenges and possible directions forward on this crucial issue. A long-standing question in global environmental politics is whether treaties matter. This question is usually applied to multilateral environmental agreements, but Clara Brandi, Dominique Blümer, and Jean-Frédéric Morin, in “When Do International Treaties Matter for Domestic Environmental Legislation?” broaden its scope to examine preferential trade agreements with environmental provisions alongside MEAs, finding the former have more robust impacts on domestic environmental legislation. Leveraging their fine-grained dataset on trade agreements (see Jean-Frédéric Morin, Andreas Dür, and Lisa Lechner, “Mapping the Trade and Environment Nexus: Insights from a New Data Set” in Global Environmental Politics 2018 18 (1): 122-139), they identify several additional relationships that advance our understanding of how international agreements affect domestic environmental legislation, including variation in impacts across specific issues as well as developed and developing countries. In their article on the Paris Agreement and the US fossil fuel industry, Lukas Hermwille and Lisa Sanderink offer a timely analysis of climate change and its effects on global economies and societies. The authors examine how the Paris Agreement provides a strong signal for shifting decision makers in the US fossil fuel industry to take action regarding climate change policy, most notably at a time when the US government under President Donald Trump has pulled