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Achievements
- Since its founding, USCAN has led the public interest community in framing the environmental and economic urgency of global warming, and has helped to bring structure, new policy, ideas, and many new government and NGO voices to the work of attaining global agreements to reduce climate change pollution. In 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, USCAN marshaled its scientific and policy expertise to influence the development of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system. The treaty included provisions for updates -- called protocols – to set mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
- In 1997, in Japan, USCAN provided ideas and policy expertise to support the development of the Kyoto Protocol. The protocol calls for industrialized countries to reduce collective green house gas emissions by 5.2% from the level in 1990.
- In 2005, during climate negotiations in Montreal, USCAN elevated the voices of citizens, mayors, business leaders, and lawmakers to call for strong action on climate change and to repudiate the Bush administration’s refusal to negotiate. USCAN’s work was credited with helping to convince other nations to continue their work to advance beyond the Kyoto Protocol.
- In Bali, Indonesia in 2007 USCAN again confronted the Bush administration’s efforts to derail global negotiations on climate change. USCAN collaborated with its international partners to expose the administration’s strategy. It then worked with partners to generate media attention to pressure Japanese, Canadian and Australian leaders—key allies to the Bush administration—to back down. The result was that the United States became so isolated that the U.S. negotiators joined the rest of the world in the consensus that emerged and in order to avoid being blamed for the downfall of the climate negotiations.
- In 2007 USCAN played a leading role in generating worldwide media attention that defined the scientific significance of the momentous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming. In December of that year, the IPCC and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to “build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
- In 2009, USCAN was at the center of the collaborative work by dozens of national and international NGOs to draw media attention and influence climate negotiations held by President Obama and world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, and the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh.
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