Will the World Climate Summit herald rapid change?

I’m rather excited about the upcoming inaugural ‘World Climate Summit’, if the objectives of the conference are met it could be the most promising breakthrough concerning climate issues outside of UN meetings yet seen. One significant difference versus a UN conference is that many global leaders of major businesses will be in attendance who will be those tasked with marrying the implementation of agreements that are made with their CSR policies. The conference will consist of high-ranking business/financial and government leaders from across the world and feature more than 100 speakers at the two-day event. It begins on December 4 at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, Mexico.

This first edition marks the commencement of a brand-new partnership global 10 year framework which aims to assist governments and businesses to bring closer real solutions to combat global climate change. In attendance will be more than 300 large companies, key financiers and delegations from different governments around the world. Collaboration is the key word being used for the entire initiative as these different individuals will seek to assess, implement and monitor far reaching proposals to reduce the impact of behavior that leads to climate change.

The initial conference will focus greatly on formatting and reviewing the 2020 targets that are outlined.  Jens Nielsen & Michael Mathres, Founders, World Climate Summit:

“We have 10 years to scale and implement existing solutions globally. Cancun will be the beginning of this global transformation, with the business and finance community driving this change.”

“Solutions to climate change such as energy efficiency already exist. We see the World Climate Summit as a perfect platform to scale and finance them regionally and globally.” Niels B. Christiansen, CEO, Danfoss (a sponsor of WCS)

The full array of speakers and topics is very impressive and ideally will be the perfect forum for those gathered in Cancun. Some of the most prominent highlights include:

• Sir Richard Branson, Ted Turner, Lord Stern, Emilio Azcarraga, President of Grupo Televisa, and more than 100 high-level speakers confirmed from more than 20 industries
• Convening, under the leadership of The UNEP Finance Initiative, the largest network of investors and financial intermediaries demanding climate change action ever assembled – representing more than $20 trillions of assets under management.
• Introducing new global initiatives and the launch of the Carbon War Room Gigaton Awards – the Oscars of sustainable business – celebrating cities, companies and leaders tackling climate change.

While the list of official attendees includes World Business Council on Sustainable Development, The Climate Group, UN Global Compact, Green Solutions and the World Economic Forum the list of speakers will almost certainly include something of specific interest to you. Also if you visit the website many of the key speakers will have their presentations streamed live online, a partial schedule now exists at the site with updates planned later this week or early next week. This definitely should be an event worth watching what you can do literally or by keeping tabs at the official ‘World Climate Summit’ website.  If the ten year plan is as ambitious as required this might be the most important global climate event in years.