Why are climate negotiators meeting in Cancun, Mexico this week?

194 negotiators from different countries around the world are meeting this week and next week in Cancun, Mexico in the 16th meeting of the United Nations Framework convention on climate change which is the world's leading body to try to find a solution to global warming. They''ll be working on advancing an agenda on climate change, which can hopefully bring parties together in a formal legally binding agreement to try and solve the problem of global warming.

What can we expect from this round of negotiations?

We're unlikely to see an agreement on a final complete climate treaty. But what we should see is progress on a few important sectoral areas. For example, it's likely that the negotiators can come to some kind of an agreement on international forestry and how we are going to sequester carbon in the forests that remain and also avoid deforestation going into the future. Secondly, we hope to see some kind of agreement on the architecture for an international climate fund. This is critically important. Last year in Copenhagen developed countries agreed they would put together a climate fund amounting to $100 billion annually to help developing countries transition to a low-carbon economy. What we hope to see this year is agreement on what that fund will look like, who will administer it, and how it will go forward. And finally we hope to see some kind of agreement on technology transfer. Another thing that developed countries have promised is that when developing countries make binding commitments to reduce their emissions, we ought to provide the technology to make tit easier to make that transition.

What steps can the United States and other counties take to fight climate change if a deal isn't reached? 

If none of these deals are reached in Cancun this year, I think the problem will be the process and not the participants. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that convenes this meeting, is a very difficult process. One hundred and ninety-four parties where every single one of them has a veto on any final outcome, so if no agreement is reached so the united states and its closest allies, the other major emitters of carbon pollution, both in developed and developing countries need to start working on finding agreements outside of this process. They should work on the G-20, they should work on other forums that the United States created like the major economies forum to get agreements on renewable electricity, on energy efficiency, and on forestry.