Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! 

But what will 2015 bring for both us and the environment...

To look at what this year holds, I will concentrate on the Lima Climate Change conference to analyse the policies regarding climate change and their implications for the population.

In 1994, the UN framework Convention on Climate Change was set up to reduce green house gas concentrations. The Lima conference in December 2014 was the the 20th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) which is designed to be the governing body of the convention (COP20, 2014). The conference lasted 2 weeks setting out a new agreement on climate change.

'Nations concluded by elaborating the elements of the new agreement, scheduled to be agreed in Paris in late 2015, while also agreeing the ground rules on how all countries can submit contributions to the new agreement during the first quarter of next year.' (UNFCCC, 2014) - This statement, taken from the conference's press release, uses the word 'agree' a lot of times and is pretty long winded!! It make me question whether the conference actually achieved anything or was it all just talk about what will happen at the next conference?

From what can be seen so far, there are some very positive outcomes for the population. Pledges were made by countries to raise the Green Climate Fund, bringing the total up to 10.2 billion (UNFCCC, 2014). There was also a decision to increase the adaptation fund for small island states which face rising sea levels and extreme weather (Guardian, 2014). My favourite outcome however, was that the Lima Ministerial Declaration which states that governments must put climate change on the school curriculum. As discussed in this blog before, EDUCATION will be key to managing climate change, so i feel this decision will give people knowledge about the global environment and therefore give them power to change it. 

I don't want to get too excited, as only draft decision files have been released, so overall it is difficult to say too much about the outcome of the conference as yet. It is important to bear in mind policy pledges are not sufficient to prevent the worst impact scenarios of climate change (Dimitrov, 2010). Also, as stated above, these decisions are set to be agreed in 2015, and also form the foundation to the climate action post 2020, when the new agreement is set to come into effect. This shows that we might have to wait around quite a while before these things actually start to make changes in greenhouse gas emissions...