BEIJING, Dec. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Leaders from more than 190 countries are attending the UN Climate Summit in Lima, Peru . The aim is to deliver the first draft of an accord to cut carbon emission and stave off dangerous climate change ahead of key talks in Paris next year.
The annual United Nations Climate Summit has been a world fixture for more than two decades. But for this, the twentieth Conference of Parties, or COP 20, expectations are unusually high.
It has come soon after the United Nations Climate Summit in New York and a stark report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which stressed that time was running out to drastically cut emissions in order to avoid a two centigrade global rise in temperature.
Last month, China and the US made a historic pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas outputs.
China agreed for the first time to cap emissions setting a goal for them to fall after 2030; the US committed to cutting its emissions by a quarter or more by 2025.
Nobel Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri the IPCC's chairman is optimistic, despite the panel's latest report.
"The difference in the case of climate change is that we don’t have the luxury of time if we don't take adequate action and timely action, clearly the impacts would be so huge and so serious that we would find it very difficult to deal with them in the future. So, I would say, that in this case, a certain sense of urgency will come into the negotiations that lead to a favorable result in Lima as well as in Paris," Pachauri said.
The Lima conference is expected to release the first draft of an accord to cut carbon emissions to be delivered in Paris in 2015. More than 3,000 negotiators from nearly 200 countries will hammer out the details over a fortnight.
This will be the largest and most important summit Peru has ever hosted, thrusting this South American nation onto the international stage. As some observers predict another failure, the host nation will do all it can to make it a success.
But the bigger countries will have to do the heavy lifting, according to the UN's assistant secretary general Robert Orr.
"In all, we need everyone to do more, but we need the big countries to lead and we need the most developed counties, which have the technology and the resources to lead disproportionately, and I think that is both for historical reasons but also for practical reasons," he said.
(Source: CNTV.com)
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