COP19

The 19th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP19) took place in Warsaw, Poland, in November 2013. The main goal of these talks was to provide a next step from current commitments by developing a path toward an agree­ment that would achieve considerable emission reductions from all major economies and poorer countries. It is to be signed in Paris in 2015 and come into effect in 2020.

The 20th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP20) is expected to take place in December 2014 in Peru.

Key Outcomes of COP19

• A pathway to a new global climate treaty in Paris in 2015 was approved. However, this was only agreed upon 30 hours after talks were supposed to end, which indicates their complexity.

• Governments around the world have just over a year to set out their targets on curbing greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 to prevent a temperature rise above the 2°C limit. These are termed as "contri­butions" rather than the stronger "commitments" that most countries wanted.

• The UK, US, Norway and Germany agreed a $280m package of finance that will be managed by the World Bank's BioCarbon fund to promote more sustainable use of land. The conference agreed a "results based" payments system that means that countries with forests will have to provide information on safeguards for local communities or biodiversity before they can receive any money. 

• A compromise was reached with a new "Warsaw international mecha­nism". Victims of disaster will receive aid, but  no liability will be linked to devel­oped countries.

There were several key moments in COP19, but Japan's announcement that it was abandoning its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020 and increase them by 3% was arguably among the most noteworthy. The shutdown of the nuclear industry in Japan following the Fukushima accident was stated as the reason for abandoning the 25% target.