Will New Climate Treaty Be a Thriller, or Shaggy Dog Story?

This December, 195 nations plus the European Union will meet in Lima for two weeks for the crucial U.N. Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, known as COP 20.  The hope in Lima is to produce the first complete draft of a new global climate agreement.

However, this is like writing a book with 195 authors. After five years of negotiations, there is only an outline of the agreement and a couple of ‘chapters’ in rough draft.

The deadline is looming: the new climate agreement to keep climate change to less than two degrees C is to be signed in Paris in December 2015.
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The future climate agreement, which could easily be book-length, will have three main sections or pillars:  mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.  The mitigation or emissions reduction pillar is divided into pre-2020 emission reductions and post-2020 sections.

Both remain contentious, in terms of how much each country should reduce and by when.
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“There were very good discussions around renewable energy and policies to reduce emissions in Bonn,” agrees Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis, international policy advisor at CAN-Latin America, a network of NGOs.
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Ironically, the most advanced mitigation chapter, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), is the most controversial outside of the COP process.

REDD is intended to provide compensation to countries for not exploiting their forests. Companies and countries failing to reduce emissions would pay this compensation.

Read original article at Will New Climate Treaty Be a Thriller, or Shaggy Dog Story?