COP15 in Copenhagen is approaching
September 2009

On 7th December 2009 the UN Climate Conference will open in Copenhagen and the world community will try to agree a solution to meet the threat from global warming.

Up to 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, campaigners and media personnel from nearly 200 countries, are expected to meet in the Danish capital in this gathering considered as one of the most important in history.

Known officially as COP15 – the 15th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the meeting in Denmark is expected to assemble ministers and leaders of 189 countries when negotiating a binding global climate agreement to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol which expires at the end of 2012.

All the world’s major governments now formally accept that temperature rises have already begun, are likely, if unchecked, to prove disastrous for human civilisation, and are being caused by emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from our power plants, factories and motor vehicles (read more about the event at www.cop15.dk).

The results from the G8 and MEF Summit meeting in L’Aquila (Italy) form part of the basis for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

At this summit both the G8 countries and the group of the 16 major developed and emerging countries (Major Economies Forum, MEF) committed themselves to international climate protection. MEF countries produce about 80 percent of the annually emitted greenhouse gases.

Both group of countries agreed to limit the average temperature increase to less than 2 degrees based on pre-industrialisation reference levels.

The United States and other G8 leaders also said they supported a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent or more by 2050. But they made no nearer-term reduction targets.

The forum of developing countries did not commit to any emission reduction targets, because the G8 wouldn’t agree to nearer-term goals which they think are more important. They did, however, state they would take actions that "represent a meaningful deviation from business as usual in the mid-term".

The emerging countries have been upset that the industrialized G8 hasn’t been forthcoming on either mid-term emissions reduction targets or pledges for financing and transferring technology to the developing world, and are refusing to commit to specific target until financing commitments are made by the G8.

Climate change experts stated that the acknowledgment on the 2 degree temperature cap from both the G8 and the developing nations was an important step since it now implies that countries actually have to do something to prevent temperatures from increasing. But they chastised the G8 for not giving any indication of how they plan to do it.