The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Cancun, Mexico, from November 29 to December 10 2010. The conference is officially referred to as the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 6th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties (CMP 6) to the Kyoto Protocol.

The conference also includes the two subsidiary bodies– the 15th session of Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and the 13th session of Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA).

There were four preparatory rounds of negotiations held during 2010. The first three sessions were in Bonn, Germany, in April, June and August. The fourth round of talks hosted in Tianjin, China in October, and set a foundation for the year-end conference.

The Convention and the Protocol

Over a decade ago, most countries joined an international treaty -- the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) -- to begin to consider what can be done to reduce global warming and to cope with whatever temperature increases are inevitable. More recently, a number of nations approved an addition to the treaty: the Kyoto Protocol, which has more powerful (and legally binding) measures. The UNFCCC secretariat supports all institutions involved in the climate change process, particularly the COP, the subsidiary bodies and their Bureau.

This section contains numerous resources -- for beginners or experts -- such as introductory and in-depth publications, the official UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol texts and a search engine to the UNFCCC library.

(China.org.cn November 22, 2010)