Two weeks ahead of the annual meet on climate change, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, the UN climate chief observed that there is 'optimism for the planet' since countries are taking climate change seriously at home.
As hopes for any deal on global warming dims at the Cancun meet later this year, United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres on Wednesday made it clear that the Kyoto Protocol will continue post 2012 as a second protocol since it does not have a 'sunset' clause.
India and the other BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China) have rightly decided to forego any funding that comes from the Fast Start Climate Finance pledges since smaller countries are in dire need of it.
A former government official in Pakistan, Tariq Banuri is the director of the Asian Centre of the Stockholm Environment Institute and has previously worked with the UN.
With climate change impacts worsening and affecting the poor and most vulnerable, governments urgently need to scale up adaptation
Antonio Guterres, who had served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees for 10 years, has emerged as the front-runner in the first two rounds of informal voting.
That does not change with the much-expected new US announcement, it only reiterates the imbalance.
The average global temperature between January and October has been 0.68 degrees Celsius higher than the 20th century's average global temperature of 14.1 degree C.
With the weaker-than-expected agreement at the recent Climate Change Conference at Lima, there is an urgent need to highlight endeavours in civil society and business for a sustainable global economy with grassroots empowerment, say Rajni Bakshi.
We lost the gains of Rio and Kyoto in Copenhagen and Paris, but it would have been worse, if any mandatory restraints were imposed on our green house gas emissions, says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
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