September 2007: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened the largest-ever meeting of global political leaders on climate change.
The event, which took place at UN Headquarters in New York, US, on 24 September 2007, was attended by 80 heads of State or Government, and representatives from 150 countries. The event involved four plenary sessions focused on adaptation, mitigation, technology and financing. The meeting was entitled, “The Future in our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change.”

“Today I heard a clear call from world leaders for a breakthrough on climate change in Bali,” Ban said at the conclusion of the meeting. The next major meeting on climate change will take in Bali in December 2007, when negotiators at the 13th session of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will seek to agree on a framework for reaching agreement on combating climate change after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period ends. “We have come a long way in building understanding and a new consensus this year. More remains to be done, but this event has sent a powerful political signal to the world, and to the Bali conference, that there is the will, and the determination, at the highest level, to break with the past and act decisively,” Ban said.

A Chair’s summary of the 24 September meeting stressed the “clear call from world leaders for a breakthrough on climate change in Bali” and highlighted the need for swift action. It also noted the need to: make the Adaptation Fund operational as quickly as possible; achieve the Millennium Development Goals; halve emissions by 2050; limit temperature increase to 2°C; make deep emission reductions in industrialized countries; minimize emissions from deforestation; support and scale-up technological solutions and cooperation; improve energy efficiency; ensure that adequate resources are available for developing countries to combat climate change; and strengthen the Clean Development Mechanism.

The Chair’s summary concluded by noting that this event was not intended as an occasion for negotiations, but was meant to express the political will of world leaders at the highest level to tackle the problem. The summary added that the upcoming Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Bali should be the “starting point for intense negotiations driven by an agreed agenda.” It stressed that these negotiations should be comprehensive, inclusive, and lead to a single multilateral framework, and that all other processes or initiatives should be compatible with the UNFCCC process and feed into it. While many world leaders attended this event, some media reports noted the absence of US President George Bush, who is hosting a meeting on climate change on 27 September, in Washington, DC.
Links to further information
Official event website
Chair’s Summary, 24 September 2007
UN news releases/reports from the event
BBC news report, 24 September 2007