U S Centric Chronology Of The International Climate Change Negotiations

The United States is a Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but not to its subsidiary Kyoto Protocol. The UNFCCC treaty was intended to address growing global concern about the possibility of human-induced global warming. As a Party, the United States has certain obligations under the treaty, and our behaviors in that context are likely to continue to draw attention on the world stage. In addition, the United States has exercised leadership for decades on climate change science, and has supported related partnerships, technology research and development, and other forms of international cooperation. This book provides a chronology, from a U.S. perspective, on more than two decades of multilateral negotiations aimed at addressing this global issue.

As the Kyoto Protocol limps along without the participation of the US and Australia, on-going climate negotiations are plagued by competing national and business interests that are creating stumbling blocks to success. Climate Change Negotiations: A Guide to Resolving Disputes and Facilitating Multilateral Cooperation asks how these persistent obstacles can be down-scaled, approaching them from five professional perspectives: a top policy-maker, a senior negotiator, a leading scientist, an international lawyer, and a sociologist who is observing the process. The authors identify the major problems, including great power strategies (the EU, the US and Russia), leadership, the role of NGOs, capacity and knowledge-building, airline industry emissions, insurance and risk transfer instruments, problems of cost benefit analysis, the IPCC in the post-Kyoto situation, and verification and institutional design. A new key concept is introduced: strategic facilitation. 'Strategic facilitation' has a long time frame, a forward-looking orientation and aims to support the overall negotiation process rather than individual actors. This book is aimed at academics, university students and practitioners who are directly or indirectly engaged in the international climate negotiation as policy makers, diplomats or experts.

Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) gather for their 16th annual meeting in 2010. Several formal and informal negotiating sessions in 2010, intended to resuscitate the global negotiations to address climate change beyond the year 2012, have followed the 2009 meeting in Copenhagen, with which many countries and observers were disappointed. Under the UNFCCC, 194 gov'ts, including the U.S., have taken on obligations to address climate change through enhanced scientific and technological cooperation, assessment of sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals, and policies and measures to mitigate GHG and to promote adaptation to climate changes. This is a print on demand report.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, Treaty Number: 102-38, 1992), the Copenhagen Accord (2009), and the UNFCCC Cancun Agreements (2010), wherein the higher-income countries pledged jointly up to $30 billion of "fast start" climate financing for lower-income countries for the period 2010-2012, and a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020. The Cancun Agreements also proposed that the pledged funds are to be new, additional to previous flows, adequate, predictable, and sustained, and are to come from a wide variety of sources, both public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.

In this book, Katrin Buchmann offers a fascinating and insightful account of the efforts of several European embassies to create alliances in the United States and in China to support the UN climate negotiations leading up to COP15.

Balanced factual and conceptual analysis of the political and economic factors that shape the United States' responses to climate change.