Full speed ahead into chaos
Berlin Climate Summit meeting in the spring of 1995

The international community of states twenty-five years ago missed the opportunity to avert the collapse in the climate. From 28 March until 7 April 1995 a hundred and sixty nations met in the German capital for the first conference of parties to the Climate Convention, this having been signed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. They bound themselves in the convention to stabilising greenhouse-gas emissions at their 1990 level by the year 2000. In Berlin, a protocol with detailed goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases, above all carbon dioxide, was supposed to be adopted for the time until the end of the century. But in spite of clear signs then of a change in the climate, the countries could not agree. The industrialised nations, in particular, refused to enter into any far-reaching obligations.

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