Over 195 countries will be attending the global summit on climate change in Paris by 2015, but prior to that time, many leading countries within the United Nations are already meeting in Lima, Peru, to finalize talks and reach agreements that would be finalized at the coming Paris summit in 2015.
The US and China have been leading talks in this regard, but other countries like France, Canada, Australia, and Germany among others are pulling their own weights in the agreements to cut down on gas emissions as a way of limiting climate change and global warming.
The two weeks discussions center on global temperatures using statistics from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess global average temperature over land and oceans. What delegates finalize at will determine the basis of the coming Paris summit 2015 discussion and deals.
Through the intervention of the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF), a total sum of $9 billion has been secured, or rather pledged by various countries, at the past climate change conference in Berlin. But Paul Bledsoe, a senior climate fellow at the German Marshall Fund thinks that other countries would do better by pledging their supports in terms of finance and pro-activeness. “Ultimately this is not a problem that can be solved by just the US, China, and the EU. There’s a whole series of countries – Canada, Australia, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia – who have not made commitments (to cut emissions) and we don’t know yet how robust their commitments are.”
Liz Gallagher, a member of the E3G think-tank and an observer of the UN climate talks also thinks member countries should do more in terms of financial commitments and active steps to cut gas emissions and encourage others to do the same. “Developed countries want a narrow scope for those guidelines, but developing countries are pushing for finance and adaption in them. That seems to be a tactical move to make sure that finance and adaptation get more political attention than in the past – for me that’s where the big tensions in Lima will be.”
There just appears to be a weak point in the whole global process for climate change and emission cuts: most countries including the US hint at the fact that they won’t be able to enter into a legally binding commitment to cut gas emissions.
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