UN CLIMATE CHANGE

The UN Climate change conference is held in Qatar. It is COP(Conference of the Parties)18 held by UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) which is an intergovernmental efforts to address climate change. It entered into force on March 21 1994 and has 194 countries under it as on may 2011.
The conference known as COP is held every year from 1995. The details of the previous COP are  

3.1 1995: COP 1, The Berlin Mandate

 3.2 1996: COP 2, Geneva, Switzerland
3.3 1997: COP 3, The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change
3.4 1998: COP 4, Buenos Aires, Argentina
3.5 1999: COP 5, Bonn, Germany
3.6 2000: COP 6, The Hague, Netherlands
3.7 2001: COP 6, Bonn, Germany
3.8 2001: COP 7, Marrakech, Morocco
3.9 2002: COP 8, New Delhi, India
3.10 2003: COP 9, Milan, Italy
3.11 2004: COP 10, Buenos Aires, Argentina
3.12 2005: COP 11/MOP 1, Montreal, Canada
3.13 2006: COP 12/MOP 2, Nairobi, Kenya
3.14 2007: COP 13/MOP 3, Bali, Indonesia
3.15 2008: COP 14/MOP 4, Poznań, Poland
3.16 2009: COP 15/MOP 5, Copenhagen, Denmark
3.17 2010: COP 16/MOP 6, Cancún, Mexico
3.18 2011: COP 17/MOP 7, Durban, South Africa
3.19 2012: COP 18/MOP 8, Doha, Qatar 

The source of the above details is from Wikipedia and the dates mentioned are in american format.


In the submit world’s poorest countries, inundated by rising seas and worsening disasters, made a last ditch plea for financial help early Saturday as negotiators at United Nations climate talks struggled to reach an ambitions deal to combat global warming.The two-week U.N. conference in the Qatar capital of Doha was never meant to yield a global climate pact to curb emissions of greenhouse gases — that has been put off until 2015. But many developing nations said they were increasingly frustrated with the lack of ambition from rich countries on everything from climate aid to the emissions cuts they will make until 2020.

Talks were set to end Friday but they continued into early Saturday with negotiators set to meet in several hours to assess progress. “The expectations we had for a great deal in Doha is no more. That is dust,” said Mohammed Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi who is a lead negotiator for a coalition of poor nations called the Least Developed Countries or LDC.

“We are facing day in and day out the adverse effects of climate change,” he said. “Nobody is nearby to rescue them. You see President Obama asking for huge funding for Hurricane Sandy ... But we won’t get that scale and magnitude of support.”

The biggest fight early Saturday swirled around what is called “loss and damage,” a relatively new concept which relates to damages from climate-related disasters. Island nations and LDC have been pushing for some mechanism to deal with this but the United States has pushed back over concerns they might be held liable for the cleanup bill since they are the world’s second biggest emitter behind China.

Many scientists say extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught on the U.S. East Coast, will become more frequent as the Earth warms, although it is impossible to attribute any individual event to climate change.

“It’s becoming the last straw for the small island states, the least develop countries,” said Alden Meyer, of the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “Seasoned negotiators are coming out of that room in tears, very emotional. They are starting to say what are we doing here? What is the point of these negotiations?”

And with the negotiations on the brink of failure, activists said they were giving up hope that any deal would include tough measures to protect the planet from the effects of global warming.

“The deal in Doha is a recipe for disaster. The deal in Doha is a coffin for the planet,” said Michael Dorsey, a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, speaking outside the negotiations. “We will see the failure to have emission targets sufficiently high enough. We are going to see the failure to move critical resources to countries on the margin in the developing world who desperately need resources to get out ahead of the unfolding climate catastrophe that is playing out around the planet.”

Most of the key disputes revolved around money.

Poor countries, especially a coalition of island nations and African countries, came into the talks demanding a timetable on how rich countries will scale up climate change aid for them to $100 billion annually by 2020 — a general pledge that was made three years ago — and how they will raise the money.

[SOURCE:INDIA SPEAKS]