Poznań
UN Climate Negotiations Kick Off in Poznan is the headline from Climate-L.Org, the “knowledge management project” run by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). (I flagged these meetings last month under IGO Update at the blog.) Nearly 11,000 folks “…from government, business and industry, environmental groups and research institutions” are gathering in Poland for two weeks as a critical intermediate step between last year’s meetings in Bali and next year’s meetings in Copenhagen. It will be in Copenhagen in December of 2009, if all goes to plan, that the final international agreement will fall into place to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
The executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had some insight into the meetings in this from “Nature Reports – Climate Change” - Interview: Yvo de Boer. He dampens any undue expectations for these meetings, and rightly so, in this sober and lucid assessment: “This is probably going to be a huge disappointment to many people, but the conference in Poznan is not going to be spectacular. It’s a halfway mark between last year’s climate summit in Bali and the next one in Copenhagen, and it’s not the moment when things will be finalized. But what we can expect from Poznan is a clear sense of direction, strong political guidance from ministers, and a much better sense of how the work needs to be managed in 2009 in order to meet that incredibly tight deadline and deliver the political essentials that Copenhagen must deliver.”
You can keep up to date on the developments in Poznań here. See also de Boer’s comments at the opening press briefing.