Some 100 heads of state will meet today at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to discuss climate change issues. The Summit on Climate Change, which is being called the “highest level summit meeting on climate change” ever assembled, was convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban-Ki-Moon in response to a lack of progress in current international negotiations preparatory to the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (known as COP15). The Conference is scheduled to take place this December in Copenhagen; its goal is the creation of a new international treaty, supplanting the Kyoto Protocol, to combat climate change.
The goal of today’s Summit is to re-energize the pre-Copenhagen negotiations by fostering international consensus among highest-level government actors on the need for immediate action to combat climate change. A major obstacle to agreement has been each nation’s reluctance to be the first to commit to costly emissions-reduction measures. Another issue is the demand from developing countries for financial and technical aid to reduce emissions. The United Nations hopes that, in today’s meeting, the heads of states can collectively “summon the will to overcome narrow national interest and give the negotiators the marching orders to cut at least the outline of a deal.”
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