African delegations for the Climate Conference have met to discuss key issues they would like to see addressed in Paris. Finance and energy were among the topics raised.
Safeguarding rainforests is an area where the United Nations has made great strides - hopefully the Paris summit can deliver more of the same.
Sze Ning/Flickr.com/Wikimedia Commons
In the final part of his essay on the Paris climate talks, Nick Rowley explains how a successful deal, whether binding or not, needs to influence directly the domestic policies of the world’s nations.
UN lead climate negotiator Christiana Figueres (second from left) has been hailed as having the dynamism needed to drive the Paris talks.
EPA/AAP
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.
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…
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…