Thousands of participants debate UN climate change draft accord in Peru

Global Business

The United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference opened today in Lima, Peru, with negotiators attempting to reach a new global agreement. Participants in this key meeting hope to deliver the first draft of an accord to cut carbon emissions and stave off climate change, which is expected to be signed at a U.N. conference in Paris next year. CCTV America’s Dan Collyns reported this story from Lima.

Participants at the U.N. summit’s 20th Conference of Parties, also known as COP20, have high expectations for their gathering in Peru.

“The COP is humanity’s opportunity to form the biggest alliance in history, which is bigger than the alliances formed in the first and second world wars, because we can all unite against a common enemy: global warming,” said Ollanta Humala, Peru’s president.

The COP20 meeting comes on the heels of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in September and a stark report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which stressed that time was running out to drastically cut emissions in order to avoid a two centigrade global rise in temperature.

Last month, China and the United States made a historic pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas output. China agreed for the first time to cap emissions setting a goal for an emissions decline after 2030, while the U.S. committed to cut emissions by a quarter or more by 2025.

Nobel Prize winner, Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, told CCTV of his optimism despite the panel’s latest report.

“The difference in the case of climate change is that we don’t have the luxury of time. If we don’t take adequate action and timely action, clearly the results would be so huge and so serious that we would find it very difficult to deal with them in the future,” he said. “So I would say that, in this case, a certain sense of urgency will come into the negotiations that lead to a favorable result in Lima as well as in Paris.”

More than 3,000 negotiators from nearly 200 countries will hammer out the details for a draft accord over 12 days.

Bigger countries will have to do the heavy lifting, said Robert Orr, a U.N. assistant secretary general.

“In all, we need everyone to do more, but we need the big countries to lead, and we need the most developed counties which have the technology and the resources to lead disproportionately. I think that is both for historical reasons, but also for practical reasons,” Orr said.


Lord Julian Hunt of CPOM discusses climate change

Getting several countries to agree on a strategy to tackle climate change can be a daunting task. CCTV America interviewed Lord Julian Hunt, a professor emeritus of the Climate Modelling Department of Earth Sciences at the University College London and a honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, about the challenges facing the United Nations.


Paul Bledsoe German Marshall Fund discusses climate change

Paul Bledsoe, president of Bledsoe & Associates, LLC and a senior fellow of the climate change and energy program at the German Marshall Fund discusses the climate change debates underway in Peru.