Producing Paris, 2015

In global climate governance, 2015 was dominated by high hopes and intense preparations for the landmark 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris at year's end — the first UN climate summit since the one in Copenhagen in 2009 that had largely failed. The preparations included both the formal UN process and the two plurilateral summits of the Group of Seven countries (G7) at Elmau, Germany, on June 7–18, and the Group of twenty countries (G20) at Antalya, Turkey, on November 15–16, just two weeks before the Paris meeting on November 30–December 13. This sequence of G7 strong performance, G20 small performance and UN solid performance was not caused by the rising climate shocks or worrying scientific evidence during 2015. It was driven by the hope that the fully inclusive UN could succeed where it had failed after the diversionary shock of the global financial crisis in 2008–2009.