This past December at the climate talks in Copenhagen the world's leaders came together to agree on an accord that provides a pathway forward, and breaks new ground on climate change. It sets the world's nations to work to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above industrial levels, puts in place critical financing for clean technologies and to protect the most vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate, and ensures that our efforts will be verified to be providing the reductions that each nation has committed to undertake. It also begins to value our standing forests, that play an important role in protecting our climate and in serving as habitat to the world's biodiversity and to indigenous communities, as well as to protecting against floods, and filtering and storing water.

Although some feel the accord does not go far enough with its targets and urgency, and that without a legally binding treaty, nations will not be bound to live up to their commitments, there are positives to the accord's 'political' nature. Without a viable treaty ready to finalize when they arrived in Copenhagen, the heads of state themselves (led in great part by President Obama) had to develop a new accord, with new terms, and negotiate directly to finalize the agreement. Their personal involvement was important, and will I believe serve to bolster their ongoing commitment to implementing the accord's terms. In addition, as a political accord not a treaty, it does not need to be ratified to enter into force; each nation decides what to put on the table, and can immediately act on its terms.

It is true that the structure for the financing, the operations of the transparency provisions, and the forest framework remain to be developed, but countries can move forward individually on each of these, indeed, it is arguable that the financing of technology deployment will need to be approached on a country by country and/or regional basis, recognizing differences in key issues such as political risk, technology needs, and energy resource availability. This is similar with forests, where some nations may be ready to initiate a national approach, others will want to begin or continue with projects, and how avoided deforestation is financed is a work in progress, with models being tested and developed. Nations can also immediately demonstrate transparency in their own nation's implementation of commitments, and begin to support on a bilateral or regional basis adaptation. The global framework for each of these provisions can evolve from, complement, and learn from these national, bilateral, and regional efforts.

The Copenhagen Accord is an important start, with support from the vast majority of nations. We must continue and dramatically accelerate our efforts to reduce emissions, and immediately ramp up support for adaptation as nations are already being impacted by climate change. The Copenhagen Accord provides an opportunity to do so, and the ongoing treaty discussions will further support the expansion of these efforts.