The question ‘who is responsible for climate change?’ lies at the heart of the politics of negotiations related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Following the failure of the 15th Conference of Parties (CoP 15) at Copenhagen to deliver a fair, equitable, ambitious and binding treaty needed to protect the climate, not much was expected out of CoP 16 at Cancun, Mexico.

The Bridging the Gap initiative and the SLoCaT partnership have prepared a paper summarising the implications of the outcomes of COP16 in Canc

The year 2010 offered mixed results concerning global climate policy, with serious setbacks as well as some small victories. In the United States, plans on long-awaited domestic climate legislation were abandoned. In China and India, national climate legislation has made small advances, but expansion of fossil-based long-term infrastructure continues to rise steeply.

Climate change is a natural phenomenon. Anthropogenic climate change has been accelerated by the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs), primarily from industrialization, deforestation and increased use of fossil fuels for transport. Scientific evidence, as cited by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), clearly indicates the wide scale of climate change.