Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into force in 1994, parties to the UNFCCC have met annually in a Conference of Parties (COP) beginning with the Berlin Mandate (1995) to further negotiate a legal protocol, which resulted in the Kyoto Protocol at COP3 (1997). Fast forward to 2009, nations had high expectations when over 180 heads of governments and heads of states met at Copenhagen for COP15. High expectations resulted in failure to achieve a new legal instrument. Through much hard talk and tough negotiations through the intervening annual COPs, it was not until COP21 that nations again completed a new legal instrument – the Paris Agreement of 2015.

Each year since 2015, nations have been negotiating the implementation details of the Paris Agreement, including the role of each nation’s nationally determined contributions and whether such voluntary contributions are conditioned on climate finance and technology assistance from wealthier nations and the provisions of cooperative approaches between nations in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

In this fireside chat, we will be joined by two climate change experts and veteran observers of the climate policy landscape who will give us their perspectives of what has been accomplished at COP26 in Glasgow and what these global policy develop-ments mean towards advances in climate actions.