Peru Calls for UN Climate Change Summit Meeting Success

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal

Peru’s Environment Minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, stressed that world leaders attending this month’s United Nations (UN) secretary-general’s climate summit meeting will help propel the debate around a new global agreement to be signed in 2015.

Despite the number of key world leaders from India, China, Australia and Germany expected to be absent from above-mentioned meeting on cutting greenhouse gases, Mr. Pulgar-Vidal, who is also the incoming president of the next round of global warming negotiations, predicted success.

“Those countries are nevertheless engaged in the climate talks,” Peru’s high-level government executive said, adding, “So we should take that as an opportunity to hear the decision-makers, to hear how much they are going to do”.

The U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has invited world leaders to U.N. headquarters in New York on 23 September for a grandly-named Climate Summit 2014.

The Peruvian minister is set to serve as president of the 20th U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP 20) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in the Andean nation’s capital Lima in December.

“We are thinking that the summit could bring us as host of the next COP 20 some good messages to move this debate forward, thus we look at this summit with optimism,” he was quoted as saying by ClimateWire.

The summit suffered a blow last week when reports surfaced that Chinese President Xi Jinping would not attend the summit. A spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general said the office cannot confirm the attendance of any specific head of state but said there will be more than 100 world leaders in all.

According to climatewire, the agreement is expected to for the first time enforce greenhouse gas emissions cuts from all major climate polluters. 

Nations have agreed to come forward early next year with “nationally determined contributions” — that is, emissions pledges for the years after 2020 — which will ultimately be wrapped up into a global deal to be signed in Paris in December 2015.

After the summit, the next stop on the official road to Paris will be the Peruvian capital Lima, where a formal negotiating session will see diplomats trying to remove some of the key roadblocks to a deal.