COP15 at a glance - what is the climate conference all about? PART I

Sitting in the night train from Basel to Copenhagen - a 17 hours ride in a train with very thin walls and very strong light bulbs - I tried to get ready for this climate summit by reading the guide to the COP15 by the "World Student Community for Sustainable Development" (http://cop15.wscsd.org/primer/) and the Primer of the South Centre (http://www.southcentre.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1131&Itemid=1). What follows are shortly the key points of the conference, its basic task and some of the abbrevations used in the media.

The fact that the intense emission of greenhouse gases such as CO2 changes the Earth's Climate has been noted allready in the 1980s. This notion let in 1992 to the first climate summit in Rio: the famous Earth Summit. In Rio, the head of states came up with the famous "United Framework Convention on Climate Change", or short the UNFCCC. 192 countries have ratified convention. It is essential to understand, that within this convention, the countries are grouped in three categories

-> Annex 1 Countries: Industrialized countries

-> Annex 2 Countries: Less wealthy developed countries agreeing to pay for some of the costs arising in developed nations due to the emission reductions

-> Non-Annex 1 Countries. Developing nations

So far so good. But this convention was not able to change the fossil fuel burning attitude of the large carbon emitters. The world needed something concrete, a treaty or a framework to actual emission reductions.