The US submission on elements of the post-2015 agreement is a good basis for further deliberation by countries, as it is exhaustive with only some elements needing to be debated for a global consensus.

Since all Parties are now going make “nationally determined contributions” towards mitigating climate change they will do so under Article 4.1 of the Convention, and the issue to be decided, by the ADP, will be what will be provided, and even more important, how these will be treated under Article 10 of the Convention - their assessment and review.

With relations between countries now being shaped by geo-economics rather than geo-politics, an emerging issue is to what extent the United States, China and India, all populous countries and top tier economies, see their national interest in giving a new meaning to words like “responsibility”, “development” and “growth” by shifting the focus from the twenty year old formula of burden-sharing for environmental degradation to modifying longer term trends in resource use, and developing a global vision for ‘sharing responsibility and prosperity’.