United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Negotiations now taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for a post-2012 agreement offer the international community an opportunity to take the difficult decisions, long overdue, to avert catastrophic climate change and set the world on a path towards poverty reduction and climate justice. 

History

The UNFCCC is an international treaty agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It aims to reduce global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions to fight global warming – climate change. The treaty itself did not set mandatory targets, but the Kyoto Protocol, established under the UNFCCC in December 1997, set binding commitments for reductions in GHG emissions for industrialised countries. The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol is set to run out in 2012. It is crucial that the international community agree a new and stronger climate change deal by the end of 2009, so that there will be no gap between the end of the first commitment period and the implementation of the second.

Road to Copenhagen 2009

The subsidiary bodies of the UNFCCC will meet a total of six times between December 2008 and December 2009 to negotiate this new deal, which will have to be endorsed by the supreme decision making body of the UNFCCC, the Conference of Parties, in Copenhagen in December 2009.

This process provides CIDSE and its partners working for poverty reduction and global social justice a unique opportunity to urge governments to commit to an effective and equitable post-2012 climate change regime.

Reaching agreement on a new climate change deal will involve complex and controversial deliberations, plagued as these are by short term political and economic concerns. CIDSE and CI emphasise, however, that we have already reached crisis point.

However difficult the decisions to be made, the overriding concern must be the consequences for the most vulnerable if we fail to take the necessary action.