Global climate conference in limbo after safety concerns cited

Chilean president Sebastián Piñera has cancelled plans to host the United Nations’ annual climate conference that was scheduled to start in December.

He cited safety concerns over massive protests against economic inequality that have rocked the country for nearly two weeks.

The decision, announced on 30 October, comes just over a month before talks were set to start in Santiago, Chile’s capital city. Piñera also cancelled an international trade conference, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which had been scheduled to take place there in mid-November.

UN climate-change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa was informed of Chile’s decision on the climate conference, known as the 25th annual Conference of the Parties (COP25), shortly before the announcement.

“We are currently exploring alternative hosting options,” she said in a statement.

“Given the important challenges that Chile faces domestically right now, we fully understand and respect the government’s decision to no longer host COP25 in Santiago,” said Helen Mountford, vice-president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington DC, in a statement.

The cancellation is the latest road block for the climate summit. Chile had agreed last year to host the talks after Brazil backed out of holding the meeting.

Piñera’s move sparked frustration as well as speculation about what comes next, but many climate observers think that the UN will ultimately find a venue for the climate talks.

The UN climate secretariat could push COP25 to next year and hold it in Bonn, Germany, where smaller climate meetings between the large annual summits occur, says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Another option could be to hold the meeting in Madrid, Spain, after the country's president Pedro Sánchez announced on 31 October that his government would be willing to host the climate summit.

“We will see what happens, but certainly COP25 is not cancelled,” van Ypersele says.