UN Climate Summit 2014—What You Need to Know About the Events

As more than 120 world leaders and thousands of environmentalists descend on the Big Apple next week, New York will become the epicenter for the discussion on climate change, which will be spearheaded by the United Nations (UN). In collaboration with several environmental groups, international leaders and celebrities from the world over, the United Nations will be hosts to several events that will surround the annual ministerial meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Here's what you need to know:

Though the Climate Summit is turning out to be a must-attend event, the summit does not fall under the formal negotiation process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Rather, the one-day summit, which was organized by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in order to garner much needed political attention for the new international treaty that will arise out of the week's formal proceedings, is designed with the public discourse in mind. With a promising list of guest speakers and celebrity hosts, that will represent the United Nations as Messengers of Peace, the purpose of the summit is not to enact global change on climate policies, but rather to ensure that the important topic is being talked about in the public social sphere.

As opposed to looking towards new emissions reductions, to bar the continued production of vast greenhouse gases, it is expected that instead the week's events will offer a series of new international initiatives that will tackle deforestation, the greening of agriculture, and the containment of methane leaks from natural gas production. As news continues to mount that the Earth's temperature is not stabilizing, and atmospheric concentrations of Greenhouse gases reach staggering new heights, the summit will try to offer the best mitigating practices in science and international politics to halt the ever-changing conditions of the delicate biome of Earth.

While many nations have made great changes in recent years towards a more sustainable global footprint, research pointing towards an even larger world population by the end of the century demands that larger action be taken to conserve the ecosystem and the climate we must deal with on a daily basis. Host nation leader, President Barack Obama is expected to speak of the significant steps the United States has taken in combating global warming, in hopes of leveraging recent reduction levels to prompt other nations to act.

Though the events will likely bring about some very important considerations and international views on the current climate change movement, as negotiations failed to produce a successful agreement at the Copenhagen ministerial meeting in 2009, a contractual change will not likely take place until the Paris meeting held at the end of 2015. But as the entire Climate Week will descend upon New York, with CEO's standing alongside environmental activists, who knows what sort of changes are possible. Luckily we only have to wait until Monday, Sept. 22 to see!