Beginning on Monday, November 28, diplomats will convene in Durban, South Africa, for the seventeenth annual UN climate negotiations, known formally as the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Those talks, which will last two weeks, are aimed at advancing international efforts to mitigate and adapt to global climate change. The proceedings will involve a mix of technical negotiations aimed at fleshing out and implementing past agreements, and political negotiations focused on elaborating the legal obligations of countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The talks will be much lower profile--and involve lower stakes--than the contentious gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, two years ago. But several important issues are still on the table, and the consequences of decisions made in Durban could linger for many years.When the Copenhagen climate talks ended in acrimony and blame trading, many speculated that the days of global climate change negotiations were numbered. Yet lost to many amid the chaos was a major political agreement (ForeignAffairs) among leaders from the United States, China, Europe, India, and others. Christened the "Copenhagen Accord," the non-binding agreement appeared to commit all countries to emissions-reduction efforts, whether quantified as absolute cuts (as in the case of the United States and Europe) or as a mix of specific emissions-cutting policies and reductions in emissions intensity (as in the case of China).
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