%0 Journal Article
%T Regaining momentum for international climate policy beyond Copenhagen
%A Michael Huettner
%A Annette Freibauer
%A Constanze Haug
%A Uwe Cantner
%J Carbon Balance and Management
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1750-0680-5-2
%X The last 20 years have witnessed increasing momentum for international environmental policy efforts in order to avoid 'dangerous' anthropogenic climate change. Major achievements in the process so far have been the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol (KP) in 1997, which entered into force in 2005. From 2005 onwards, Parties increasingly focused on the negotiations of the global climate regime beyond 2012. The 2007 Bali Action Plan kicked off the actual negotiations on a post-2012 climate agreement, producing a comprehensive negotiations roadmap that was to lead the way to the adoption of a new treaty at the climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 [1]. After very limited progress at a series of meetings prior to Copenhagen, the initial ambitions for reaching a legally binding agreement in Copenhagen had been reduced to the hope of reaching political consensus on the key building blocks of the Bali Action Plan. However, the summit largely failed to deliver on this objective. Its main result, the 'Copenhagen Accord' (CA) which had been negotiated by a group of Parties led by the US and the largest emerging economies, did not gain the endorsement by the plenary of the Conference of the Parties (COP), and was merely 'taken note of'. All in all, the substantial advances made by Copenhagen put the world on a trajectory beyond 2¡ãwarming by the end of this century.At the same time, combating climate change has become urgent. Global carbon dioxide emissions have risen by approximately 41% since 1990 [2]. If 'dangerous' climate change of more than 2¡ãC is aimed to be prevented with 67% probability, then global emissions should peak between as early as 2015 and 2020. If the upper end of this deadline is chosen, annual global emission reductions have to amount to 9.0% from 2020 onwards. Since it remains questionable whether societies are technologically and politically capable of achieving such ra
%U http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/5/1/2