2014. A year full of challenges, big time!

28 June 2013

Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis
Fundación Biosfera, CANLA

In Bonn GRULAC endorsed Peru’s nomination as COP host for 2014. In the last day of negotiations, Peru’s Minister of Environment himself notified Parties about Peru being the COP 20 presidency. This is great news for Latin America; and the COP will certainly bring a lot of focus on the issues that concern the region.

But 2014 is not just another year, COP 20 will not be a transitional COP, neither something to diminish. Many international climate events will mobilize media attention, people, citizens and politicians to ramp up ambition in the year (2014) countries should present targets on both mitigation and finance. Besides the regular intersessional and ADP sessions, UN General Secretary, Ban Ki Moon, called world leaders to meet for highlighting the urgency of decisions in this matter (in 2014). Venezuela on the other hand proposed to host the traditional ministerial Pre-COP, but they have decided to do things differently and to invite all Civil Society to participate in a non-traditional manner. The list of important events in 2014 concludes with the FIFA World Cup in Brazil ,which will have all attention from all around the world, especially the attention of Brazilians.

With all this happening around Peru as the COP Presidency and with so many milestones to be achieved, there is a very interesting challenge ahead. Finance pledges have to be on the table, and mitigation pledges have to be clear. Also a legal architecture of the new legal instrument should be approved in Lima, Peru by th end of 2014; this is key.

Peru has a good potential as a facilitator, and many coutries are expressing their support, we will have to see how Peru manages the pressure and how constructively countries work to let Peru conduct successful meetings in a year full of expectations.