A two-week meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or COP14, is now under way in Poznan, Poland, with some 10,000 delegates and environmentalists from some 190 countries attending. The participants are supposed to discuss international efforts to combat global warming to be carried out in and after 2013.
At the December 2007 COP13 meeting held in Bali, Indonesia, the parties to the UNFCCC decided to work out and agree on a new framework to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in a meeting to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will be COP15. The Kyoto Protocol requires 37 industrialized countries and the European Union to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions by an average 5 percent from 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.
The Poznan meeting is an important halfway mark on the road to the major meeting in Copenhagen. Participating countries, which will review the Kyoto Protocol, face the task of making solid preparations for a new international climate change deal to be made in Copenhagen. They need to strengthen their determination to avert the serious consequences of the failure to fight global warming — including rising sea levels by several meters, loss of a large number of species, and shortage or lack of water for millions of people — and to commit themselves to working out an effective framework.