May 19, 2013
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The week's top five must-sees,
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Description
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international environmental treaty negotiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to 14, 1992. The objective of the treaty is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
The treaty itself set no binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. In that sense, the treaty is considered legally non-binding. Instead, the treaty provides a framework for negotiating specific international treaties that may set binding limits on greenhouse gases.
The UNFCCC was opened for signature on May 9, 1992, after an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee produced the text of the Framework Convention as a report following its meeting in New York from April 30 to May 9, 1992. It entered into force on March 21, 1994. As of May 2011, UNFCCC has 194 parties.
The parties to the convention have met annually from 1995 in Conferences of the Parties to assess progress in dealing with climate change. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was concluded and established legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The 2010 Cancún agreements state that future global warming should be limited to below 2.0 °C relative to the pre-industrial level.
(via Freebase)
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![Top polluter hosts 'critical' climate change summit [BBC Arabic, UK]](/images/image_cache/base-14383000/14383840/thumbnail.width=304,height=171,grow=1,crop=center.jpg?sig=a78ded2ea236936ceb95a00b4aded58f)