World Moves One Step Closer to Climate Treaty
Compromise reached in Lima among UN negotiators, with much work remaining.
It could have been a scene in a political thriller, the negotiators meeting into the early hours Sunday morning, going 48 hours without a break. Finally, they concluded the UN's 20th climate conference with a draft agreement that sets the stage for the next treaty on global warming.
The draft—a general framework that lacks specifics—is a compromise that leaves no one overjoyed but most happy that at least something was accomplished, after the whole process threatened to unravel just days earlier in Lima, Peru, during a two-week assembly. (Learn about the five takeaways from the negotiations.)
For their part, environmentalists have had a mixed response to the latest draft agreement, which was heavily edited over the past few days as
