Crucial UN Climate Change Conference gets underway at Lima, Peru from today

Lima, Peru will host the 20th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 10th session of the Meeting of the Parties (CMP) to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol from December 1-12, 2014.

The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are yearly conferences held in the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They serve as the formal meeting of the UNFCCC Parties (Conferences of the Parties) (COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change, and beginning in the mid-1990s, to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol, it may be recollected, commits State Parties to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, based on the premise that (a) global warming exists and (b) man-made CO2 emissions have caused it. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005. There are 192 Parties to the Protocol. The Kyoto commitment period expired on 31 December 2012. On 8 December 2012, at the end of the 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference held at Doha, an agreement was reached to extend the Protocol to 2020 and to set a date of 2015 for the development of a successor document, to be implemented from 2020.

The 2014 ministerial-level climate conference takes place one year before the deadline for a new, global deal on curbing global warming. Due to be signed in Paris at the COP 21/CMP 11 in December 2015 and take effect from 2020, the accord, if reached, would roll back carbon emissions and ease the threat of ecosystem damage and species loss for future generations.

The last climate treaty was the Kyoto Protocol, inked in 1997. A bid to follow it up in Copenhagen in 2009 ended in a near fiasco, as it could not achieve a binding agreement for long-term action..At the Conference of parties held in Durban, South Africa in 2011, the conference agreed to a legally binding deal comprising all countries, which will be prepared by 2015, and to take effect in 2020.

It is in this background that the Climate Change Conference assumes significance. 

The overview schedule of the Lima Conference on Climate Change can be accessed here.