As the US gets more involved in international climate change policy again, here's background to help us along.
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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty addressing climate change, negotiated and signed by 154 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992. It established a Secretariat headquartered in Bonn and entered into force on 21 March 1994. The Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 and which entered into force in 2005, was the first extension to the UNFCCC. It was superseded by the Paris Agreement, which entered into force in 2016. As of 2020, the UNFCCC has 197 signatory parties. Its supreme decision-making body, the Conference of the Parties (COP), meets annually to assess progress in dealing with climate change.
The UNFCCC seeks for the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic human-induced interference with the earth's climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
