Next Week Is Climate Week
NASA Earth Observatory
SHARE
Climate Change Collage

Climate Change Collage

Next week is Climate Week in New York City. The happenings begin on Sunday with what promises to be a massive march demanding action to curb human-propelled global warming. On Tuesday, the United Nations will hold an all-day climate-focused summit for world leaders.

Each day will also brim with meetings, panels, and exhibits on climate change, energy, and resilience happening all over town. PopSci will be covering the summit and the best of the rest, so check back here for updates.

Tuesday’s climate summit is being held at UN headquarters, but isn’t officially part of the existing international climate treaty process (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC). So it’s not going to end with a unified international statement on how we’ll curb global warming.

But organizers hope that it will help those negotiations, by amping up the momentum for getting a strong agreement in late 2015, at the official climate talks in Paris – an agreement that must do more than current international efforts if we’re to keep the average future temperature increase below 2 degrees Centigrade.

To help make that happen, UN officials have teased big announcements on Tuesday including:

  • Statements from world leaders on the greenhouse gas pollution cuts they will offer in France in 2015
  • News from significant business and finance entities about setting a price on carbon emissions
  • More action on resilience and risk reduction: increasing the capacities of communities worldwide to withstand the impacts of climate change
  • Shifts of global business investments into climate-friendly economic sectors

Over 100 national leaders are expected to be at the summit, where they’ll hear from scientists, activists, businesses, and each other. UN officials say it will be the most heads of state present at any international climate meeting. (Of the dozens who attended 2009’s treaty talks in Copenhagen, most have since left office.)

The week’s climate focus will come on the heels of today’s announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that globally, August 2014 was the warmest August since record-keeping began in 1880.

Click here for more of PopSci’s climate change coverage.