Climate agreement lacks urgency, researchers warn

The latest UN Climate Change Conference has concluded with an agreement that has been welcomed by negotiators, but criticised as insufficient by some politicians and researchers.

After two weeks of negotiations at the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—held in Katowice, Poland—representatives from 196 countries agreed, on 15 December, to a rulebook on implementing the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

Delegates agreed how countries’ transitions to sustainable energy will be monitored and reported every two years. However, they failed to reach a consensus on whether to accelerate their climate change mitigation efforts beyond those agreed in 2015. This is despite the publication in November of a UN report stressing the need for global warming to be kept below 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial temperatures, rather than 2°C as in the Paris agreement.