http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/meeting-copenhagen-whats-it-all-about-20091119?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+greenpeaceukclimate+%28Greenpeace+UK+-+Climate+Change%29A meeting in Copenhagen – what’s it all about?
Posted by christian on 19 November 2009
The key thing to understand about the upcoming UN climate summit in Copenhagen is how massively, vitally, fate-of-the-earth-decidingly important brackets are to the whole process. Yes,
. If you grasp the brackets thing, then everything else is pretty much irrelevant detail.
Nevertheless, let's do a little run-through before we get onto it.
The Copenhagen summit, also known as the Conference of the Parties 15 or COP15, or 'the best moment we've ever had to actually, you know, sort it out', is the fifteenth big meeting organised by the United Nations to discuss a global response to climate change.
Delegates from every country in the world will be trying to get a global agreement on how to address climate change. Well, some of them will be trying. Some of them might not actually be trying very hard.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the diplomatic process which Copenhagen sits in. It stretches back to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where countries first agreed the need to come up with a plan to tackle climate change. In 1997 we got the Kyoto protocol - the current global agreement to reduce carbon emissions. But if Kyoto is the UN climate equivalent of the film Terminator, Copenhagen would definitely be Terminator 2. Happens a few years later, more at stake, with a bigger budget and subtitled Judgement Day.
We're getting to the brackets. Over the years, many different arguments and issues have played out through the UNFCCC process. Discussion, disagreement and debate leading up to this year's meeting in Copenhagen has been particularly intense, because this year we're supposed to agree what should happen when the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012.
..more..
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