BY: STEFANIE PHILLIPS
Talk of the 2015 United Nations climate change summit has been dominating the headlines recently. Maybe you haven’t been reading up on everything you should be, and now it seems like you’re too far behind to catch up. Overwhelmed, you don’t know where to start reading. Or maybe you’re confused by all of the information out there and deciphering fact from opinion isn’t your thing. We’re gonna stop for a second to break it down for you. Here’s a list of all the things you should probably know about COP 21.
1. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is hosting a climate change conference that will bring participants from all over the globe to Paris, France.
2. More than 100 world leaders will be there. The list includes Valdimir Putin, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and the leaders of India and China
3. The conference will start November 30 and go until December 11 of this year.
4. They’re meeting to reach a universal agreement aiming to limit the rise of global temperatures below 2° C, between pre-industrial times and the end of the century.
5. A rise in global temperatures by just 2° C will speed up the the melting of the world’s ice sheets. The two main ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. Together they make up 99 per cent of the freshwater ice on Earth.
6. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, if the Greenland ice sheet melts sea levels will rise about six metres and if the Antarctica ice sheet melts sea levels will rise about 60 metres. In the worse case scenario, the whole Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. would be underwater and Florida would vanish.
7. On the other side of the world, the islands of the the Maldives are at risk of being completely submerged in water by the year 2100, or by 2085 if temperatures keep rising.
8. To stop temperatures from rising there needs to be a global decrease in emissions, even from developing countries.
9. How developed countries can help developing countries contribute to lowering emissions will be among the topics up for discussion. Sweden has already promised $580 million over four years to this cause.
10. France is tightening its borders for the duration of the conference as a preventive measure in case of a terrorist threat or risk of disruption to public order. People will still be able to enter the country from neighbouring European countries, but they will have to go through stricter border control measures.
The good news about this information is that all of the parties have agreed to a text for a potential global agreement on climate change. The bad news is that the text is not concise, to say the least. The potential agreement is 55 pages long and will determine the future of some major cities, and potentially countries around the world.
Image sourcing: nyt.com, wordpress.com, weathergamut.com, carbonbrief.org, panda.org
