The much-hyped 2009 Copenhagen climate summit yielded only a flimsy accord. But, as Nick Rowley writes in part 2 of his three-part essay on the 2015 Paris climate talks, there are several reasons why this year won’t see another flop.
Hopes for a singular breakthrough at the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks were dashed, but that doesn’t mean the negotiating process isn’t making quiet progress.
EPA/Henning Bagger/AAP
Hopes are high that a global climate deal can be reached in Paris this year. In part 1 of a three-part essay on the prospects for such a deal, Nick Rowley sets out three myths about the UN talks that need to be dumped before we go forward.
The US proposes to meet its climate targets through regulation, including reducing carbon emissions from coal power plants by a third below 2005 levels.
Cathy/Flickr
The United States’ post-2020 climate target raises many questions for this year’s global climate talks, and puts pressure on Australia to raise the stakes.
The US has formally submitted its post-2020 climate target to the UN.
EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo
James Whitmore, The Conversation e Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
In the lead up to climate meetings in Paris at the end of the year, countries will release draft targets - the framework of a possible global climate deal. Follow our interactive map as we track these targets.
Countries are working towards meetings in Paris in November that could see the first global climate deal since the Kyoto Protocol.
Taylor Miles/Flickr
Ahead of meetings at the end of this year in Paris, countries will submit draft contributions for a global climate deal. The goal: reducing greenhouse gases beyond 2020, and ultimately keeping global warming below 2C.
The United Nation’s IPCC is considered the definitive source on climate science in international negotiations.
UN IPCC
Attacks on institutions that keep records of global temperatures, such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Met Office, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, continue…
Shell chief Ben van Beurden is pointing the way for oil companies to demand greater certainty over future climate policy.
EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/AAP
In a speech last Thursday at International Petroleum Week – one of the biggest events on the industry’s calendar – Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, argued that big energy companies…
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
In the early morning hours of Sunday, December 14th last year, climate negotiators in Lima, Peru concluded the COP-20 talks with an agreement among 195 countries. The Lima Call for Climate Action, or Lima…
Could people get just as concerned about climate change as nuclear war?
Nuclear war image from www.shutterstock.com
From the 1950s until the 1990s, nuclear weapons were viewed as the greatest threat to human life on the planet. Jonathan Schell, whose book The Fate of the Earth (1998) perhaps best crystallised the danger…
This is the area that holds strategic importance
Reuters/Balazs Koranyi
In a few short months the United States assumes Chair of the Arctic Council (AC). This is a two-year long opportunity to shape the future of the Arctic, an opportunity that will likely not come around…
It would be a stretch to call the latest climate talks in Peru a raging success.
EPA/COP20
The UN’s climate negotiations in Lima (known as COP20) over the past fortnight were held in a military compound normally used by the Peruvian Army. Each day, negotiators at the COP passed an obstacle course…
Handshakes as the Lima conference went into overtime to deliver an agreement. But there is still plenty of uncertainty about how next year’s Paris deal might look.
EPA/COP20
The world is a step closer to a new climate agreement that will see all countries, not just developed ones, take action on greenhouse emissions after 2020. The two-week Lima climate summit, which ran two…
UN negotiators will struggle to balance the demands of countries that want binding emissions targets, and those that don’t.
EPA/Paolo Aguilar
Could the preoccupation with legally binding targets sink the next climate deal in Paris in 2015? In the run-up to this week’s Lima talks, widely seen as a precursor to the Paris summit, the Abbott government…