ABSTRACT
1996 was a year of ups and downs for the Climate Change Convention and the processes associated with it. The key decision before the Conference of Parties (CoP), and hence both the Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate (AGBM) and the Scientific and Technological Advice which report to it, was whether to accept the Second Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The US, having appeared to ‘green’ considerably at the second CoP, came up with a new position, revealed in a ‘non-paper’ issued in Washington the week before the AGBM. The AGBM found itself in the position of having the US proposing binding targets after 2010, and the EU and Alliance of Small Island States. The widely differing perceptions of individual Parties as to the likely magnitude and rate of climate change and of their impacts, both upon them and upon the World.
