Washington, D.C. — At last year’s historic Conference of the Parties, or COP, to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, countries came together under intense international scrutiny to reach the landmark Paris agreement to combat climate change. At this year’s COP in Marrakech, Morocco, there will be considerably less fanfare, but the task will be nonetheless critical: to make the transition from negotiation to fulfillment of the Paris agreement and to set a constructive precedent for how COPs function in the Paris era. The Center for American Progress has released an issue brief describing how this can be best accomplished through a two-pillared approach:
- Engaging with national, subnational, and nonstate actors that are driving progress toward delivering on—and even exceeding—the mitigation, finance, and other commitments already made in Paris
- Providing leadership on the ongoing work of UNFCCC parties in order to fully operationalize the Paris agreement, such as creating a robust mechanism to facilitate transparency with respect to countries’ emissions and progress toward meeting their targets
“Morocco will be hosting the first in a long line of COPs tasked not with negotiating a new international agreement but with implementing and fulfilling what was agreed last December in Paris,” said Pete Ogden, a Senior Fellow focusing on international climate policy at the Center. “Fortunately, Morocco is well positioned to create a constructive precedent for what COPs should work to achieve in the Paris era.”
Click here to read the paper.
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Tom Caiazza at [email protected] or 202.481.7141.
###