Thursday, February 11, 2016
Century Foundation: A Post-Paris Agenda for Climate Security at the UN
After much build-up, and two weeks of grueling negotiations, the international community left the Paris Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.
This agreement, forged when climate change has already led to a rise in the Earth’s average temperature of 1°C above pre-industrial levels, will set the tone for action on energy, environment, and economic priorities for an entire generation.
The agreement is ambitious, seeking to coordinate global action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) and ameliorating the effect of climate change currently ongoing (adaptation). To that end, the agreement includes a long-term goal of preventing global temperatures from increasing beyond 2°C above pre-industrial levels (with a preferred target of 1.5°C), mechanisms for increasing the ambition of the climate change plans of individual nations, and calls for increasing finance flows from developed states to developing ones to assist the latter in mitigation and adaptation. . .