Monday, 1st of December, a new session of the UN climate talks, begin. This time parties meet in Lima, Peru, and they are faced with a packed agenda.
International climate negotiations have been an ongoing process for years by now, and one could ask if they deliver any result? The answer is yes, but with an additional note, that it is not enough, and that the ambition must be turned up.
However, let us start with Lima. What can we expect from two weeks of negotiations? Will the climate problem be solved? The answer is no, but still the coming two weeks will be crucial for our future.
According to the plan, a global climate agreement should be adopted in Paris, December 2015. To take some of the pressure off from the meeting in Paris, parties are asked to come up with their intended contributions to the global agreement, already in the beginning of 2015. In that way, the proposed level of ambition is set already before the Paris meeting begins, and it will be easier to discuss frameworks, mechanism, and possibilities for scaling up the ambition further.
To make this plan work, there must be agreement already now about the type of "intended contributions" parties should submit, and what kind of elements the future Paris agreement will include. Lima will host intensive discussions about formats, principles and priorities, which are needed to pave the way for a global agreement next year.
Lima may not deliver the big global agreement the world needs, but some of the fundamental decisions about its focus, content and format will be agreed already now, giving us an indication about how the world will tackle climate change in the coming decades.
Mattias Söderberg is Co-Chair of the
ACT alliance advisory group on climate change advocacy, and senior advocacy advisor at DanChurchAid, Denmark. Mattias has been following the climate debate closely since 2007, and in 2009 he was head of the Ecumenical COP15 secretariat, with the task to coordinate global participation of churches and church based organisations.
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