What is UNFCCC?

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 or CMP 11 will be held at Le Bourget, Paris, from November 30 to December 11. It will be the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 11th session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997Kyoto Protocol.

UNFCCC is presently the only international climate policy framework with broad legitimacy, due in part to its virtually universal membership, negotiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The objective of the treaty is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

The treaty itself set no binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. In that sense, the treaty is considered legally non-binding. The UNFCCC was adopted on May 9, 1992, and opened for signature on June 4, 1992, after an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee produced the text of the Framework Convention as a report following its meeting in New York from April 30 to May 9, 1992.

The 196 parties to the convention have met annually from 1995 in Conferences of the Parties (COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was concluded and established legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The 20th COP took place in Peru in 2014. On May 17, 2010, Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica succeeded Yvo de Boer as the head of the Secretariat.