 My name is Salim al-Haq. I'm in Lima Peru for the 20th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Today is Monday the 1st of December. It was the opening day for the event. We had a spectacular dance presentation by Peruvian dancers and street theater people we had the President of the previous conference of parties from Warsaw the Minister for Poland Opened the event and then handed over to the current president is the Minister for Environment from Peru Manuel Pulgar Vidal Who is going to be presiding over the event for the next two weeks? We also had the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Dr. Pachauri giving us the the fifth assessment reports synthesis reports Which just came out a list in a month ago and Christiana Figuer is the executive secretary of The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change the mood is very very good here very positive people are very enthusiastic that we shall have an outcome in Lima in the next couple of weeks the main expected outcome is to develop momentum towards a ambitious and fair deal in Paris a year from now But we need to put in place all the essential ingredients of that agreement in Paris and have another year to finalize it Once we've agreed on what goes into that agreement in Lima There'll be no more opening up of new items So this is the last chance for countries to put into the package that they want for Paris next year Whatever it is that they need to put into it the two major items are the levels of ambition of Mitigation we have some very good promises made by countries like the United States and China very recently the two presidents of The two countries have made some very ambitious Promises the other element is money again We've got some good promises on the table from a number of countries including the United States and China as well And we nearly have ten billion dollars promised in the Green Climate Fund The problem on both of these despite the optimism of Mitigation targets and funding is that they both fall short of what we need on Mitigation we are still headed for well over three degrees when we need to be bending the curve down to two degrees and on funding We're supposed to be getting a hundred billion dollars a year and we've only got ten so on both counts We are way behind where we need to be but the optimism is there that we can raise the ante both an ambition in Mitigation and as well as promises on the funding so we shall see what happens in the next two weeks in Lima But the mood right now is very positive