Turning words into action on climate change

摘要

The annual climate change COP, most recently held in Doha (Qatar), has now come and gone. As has been dissected ad nauseam, very little was accomplished. Some will see this as a failure, as I do, and others will reasonably enough note that this meeting, the 18th such COP, was never intended to be a milestone moment. The current plan, in fact, is for a 'post-Kyoto' international climate agreement to be adopted only at the COP20 summit in December 2015 (the Kyoto Protocol was adopted on 11 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, and entered into force on 16 February 2005. As of September 2011, 191 states had signed and ratified the Protocol. The USA signed but did not ratify the Protocol and Canada withdrew from it in 2011).