Abstract：As global climate governance deepens, regulatory measures adopted by states to fulfill their climate obligations under international treaties such as the Paris Agreement are increasingly triggering normative conflicts between climate governance and international investment protection obligations, leading to a surge in climate-change-related international investment arbitration cases. These cases lay bare two fundamental weaknesses in the traditional arbitration framework when it confronts climate disputes. On the substantive side, the expansive readings of indirect expropriation, the elastic applications of the fair and equitable treatment standard, and the cramped invocation of exception provisions have severely constricted host states’ policy space for climate action. On the procedural side, the growing demand for specialized climate expertise, combined with restricted third-party access and lopsided evidentiary rules, has cast a shadow over the legitimacy of arbitral outcomes. To reconcile the tension between investment protection and climate governance, it is urgent to overcome the functional limitations of the traditional international investment arbitration mechanism, which is constrained by the binary operational logic of the legal system. A shift is needed from an adversarial, case-by-case adjudicatory paradigm to a governance paradigm based on “structural coupling” among subsystems such as law and science. This transformation aims to achieve a dynamic coordination between investment rights and climate justice in the global commons. Concretely, at the substantive rules level, constructing a climate-friendly investment treaty paradigm, narrowing the standard for determining indirect expropriation, and activating exception clauses; at the procedural mechanism level, establishing specialized climate arbitration tribunals, improving evidentiary rules, and enhancing third-party participation; at the governance system level, promoting organic coordination among international arbitration, domestic judiciary, and climate finance mechanisms.
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2026, Vol. 43 
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