What is the meeting and what is its goal?
Officially called the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the summit is being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18. It’s also known as the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 5th Meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP 5) to the Kyoto Protocol. To break that down, this is the 15th meeting of the participants who attended the UNFCCC, a convention called the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. A treaty, also referred to as the UNFCCC, was created at that conference. It’s also the 5th meeting of the participants who met in 1997 to update that treaty, which produced an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions called the Kyoto Protocol. The stated goal of the Copenhagen meeting is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which effectively expires in 2012.
