COP-20 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) commenced on December 1, 2014 and was held in Lima, Peru.

During the 15-days conference, delegations from 195 countries from across the globe discussed and debated over the next major international climate agreement, which - under the auspices of the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action - is to be finalized and signed one year from now at COP-21 in Paris, France.

The conference took a significant departure from the past two decades of international climate policy by including all the countries under a common legal framework as per the promise made in the Durban Platform. This, however, since the 1995 Berlin Mandate and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, has featured coverage of only a small subset of countries, namely the so-called Annex I countries (more or less the industrialized nations, as of twenty years ago).

The expanded geographic scope of the incipient Paris agreement - combined with its emerging architecture in the form of a pragmatic hybrid of bottom-up nationally determined contributions (NDCs) plus top-down elements for monitoring, reporting, verification, and comparison of contributions - represents the greatest promise in many years of a future international climate agreement that is truly meaningful.

Other industrialized countries also announced their own contributions - some quite possibly in Lima over the two weeks. More importantly, the pressure is now on the other large, emerging economies - India, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia - to step up.

The talks in Lima during the two week conference produced at least a rough draft of the Paris agreement, which is to be elaborated and finalized over the coming year and signed (with abundant photo opportunities for heads of state) in Paris in December, 2015.