UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) was an outcome…

Concept

A framework convention is an umbrella treaty that lays down principles and institutions and leaves detailed obligations to later instruments. Its life has two distinct legal moments: adoption, when the negotiating body finalises the text, and opening for signature, when states first become able to sign it. These two moments can occur at different places and on different dates.

A treaty is therefore identified with the conference at which it was opened for signature - the global meeting that presented it to the world. A protocol is not a meeting's output in this sense at all: it is adopted later, under an already existing convention, to add operational or binding obligations to it. So, to find the meeting a convention came out of, ask a single question: at which international conference was that convention opened for signature?

Application

1. The text of the UNFCCC was adopted on 9 May 1992 at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

2. It was then opened for signature at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held at Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992 — the meeting popularly called the Earth Summit or Rio Summit — where 154 states signed it.

3. It entered into force on 21 March 1994, ninety days after the fiftieth instrument of ratification was deposited.

4. The same Rio meeting also opened the Convention on Biological Diversity for signature and adopted Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration, which is why it is remembered as the founding conference of the modern environmental treaty system.

Cross-check

The other three named items belong to a different regime or to a later date, so none of them can be the meeting that produced the UNFCCC:

• Stockholm Conference (1972) — the UN Conference on the Human Environment. It produced the Stockholm Declaration and led to the creation of UNEP, twenty years before any climate convention existed.

• Montreal Protocol (1987) — an instrument adopted under the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. Ozone depletion and climate change are legally separate regimes.

• Kyoto Protocol (1997) — adopted at COP-3 under the UNFCCC itself. An instrument created under a convention cannot be the meeting that produced that convention; the direction of dependence runs the other way.

Result: the UNFCCC is the outcome of the Rio Summit (UNCED, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992).