page_title: 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: United Nations Climate Change Conference, Doha, Qatar, 2012
context_page_description: The 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference was the 18th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 8th session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference took place from Monday 26 November to Saturday 8 December 2012, at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha.
  The conference reached an agreement to extend the life of the Kyoto Protocol, which had been due to expire at the end of 2012, until 2020, and to reify the 2011 Durban Platform, meaning that a successor to the Protocol is set to be developed by 2015 and implemented by 2020. Wording adopted by the conference incorporated for the first time the concept of "loss and damage", an agreement in principle that richer nations could be financially responsible to other nations for their failure to reduce carbon emissions.
context_section_description: The United Nations Climate Change Conferences are annual multi-lateral meetings of governments held in different locations around the world under the sponsorship of the United Nations that serve as a forum for countries to discuss climate change matters.  The conferences seek to address the threat of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. Between 2000–2011 carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere was 20% of the total concentration growth since prehistoric level (391,57 ppm in 2011 and 369,52 ppm in 2000)  The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has reached 391 ppm (parts per million) as of October 2012 versus the pre-industrial concentration was 280 ppm which the consensus of world climate scientists agree is unsustainable.
  The conferences are attended by dignitaries and sometimes heads of state from most countries and generally draw significant activity by various environmental advocacy groups.  Consequently, the conferences are generally well covered by the world media agencies. The 2012 conference is held at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha, and with a projected attendance of 17,000 participants it is expected to be the largest conference to have ever been held in Qatar.  The conference is casually called the COP18 /CMP 8 conference but these are technically different but closely related and sometimes integrated conferences.  In 2012, the UNFCCC conference serves as an umbrella for seven concurrent and interrelated meeting groups collectively called the Doha 2012 UNFCCC conference.  The main conference is also preceded by several topical pre-sessions.
caption: President of the conference Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah (center) and Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres (left) at COP18
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