I've received piles and piles of background information on the UN Climate Conference, it's structures and programs, thanks to the the near endless string of emails sent via the Canadian Youth Delegation listerv! I did my best to mine through these documents on the plane ride over to Poznan and found a number of them to be quite helpful.
As we are now less than 48 away from the official start of COP-14, I wanted to take a moment to break down "The Conference" into small, manageable (and explanatory) bits for anyone who is looking for a quick crash course. I hope that this will provide a guide to some of the strange looking acronyms that will, no doubt, find their way into this blog over the course of the next two weeks.
Of course, for the sake of space, I'm not going to touch on all of these structures. So, I've condensed what I consider to be the most important in to this post. I'll be sure to provide background notes on anything relevant I don't cover here.
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In June 1992, the international community adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) (also known as the Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
The UNFCCC is a treaty that aims to stabilize global greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, responding to the growing body of scientific evidence that linked GHG emissions with damage to the Earth's climate system: with catastrophic results.
The UNFCCC, itself, is a non-binding treaty. It sets no limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual nations and did not contain any enforcement provisions. There are currently 192 member countries to the UNFCCC.
Despite it's lack of 'teeth', the treaty does provide for protocols that would enable mandatory GHG emission reduction targets to be set.
Fast forward ten years later. December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention is established. The Protocol includes binding emission reduction targets for developed countries for the period 2008-2012.
Negotiations of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol take place at different times throughout the year, and culminate at the UN Climate Change Conference - usually held at the end of the year. The UN Climate Change Conference is where the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC meet.
The UN Climate Change Conference is also where the overseeing body of the Kyoto Protocol meets (referred to as the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol - or CMP for short).
In December 2007, the "Bali Road Map" was reached, and involved representatives of both developed and developing nations. It was a landmark decision of the UNFCCC parties to launch formal negotiations on a deal for long-term co-operative action once the timelines for the Kyoto Protocol expire. The Bali Road Map came on the heels on an Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)report earlier in the year (the leading review body on climate change science) that stated global climate change is in fact accelerating, much of it because of GHG emissions through human activity.
Negotiations for the Bali Road Map (and post-Kyoto commitments) are set to conclude at the UNFCCC in Copenhagen, 2009 and come into force no later than 2012. Poznan will play an important role in pushing this objective forward.
Following the Bali Road Map, two additional working groups were established to play a role in reaching a Copenhagen deal.
The Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) - which assembles all 192 Parties to the UNFCCC - deals exclusively with negotiations on the Copenhagen deal. It focuses on key issues for the deal including mitigation, adaptation, technology transer and financial instruments.
The Ad-hoc Working Group on further commitments for Annex 1 Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) was established to negotiate further commitments of industrialized countries under the Kyoto Protocol.
Both of these Ad-hoc Working Groups will meet in Poznan. Negotiations will wrap up in 2009.
Now that you've got a sense of some of the major bodies to the UN Climate Change Conference, and the roles they play, check out the official COP-14 Poznan website for conference schedules, agendas and information on additional subgroups to the Conference that may be of interest.
For a more thorough backgrounder produced by the UNFCCC, click here.
