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<\/a><\/p>\nFrom his position on the front lines of decades of international climate negotiations, Adil Najam,<\/a> Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University,<\/a> has seen his fair share of promises to save the planet. But after a quarter century, he says, it’s time for action.<\/p>\n Najam made this sobering assessment as he traveled to the opening ceremonies of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, as part of the Pakistan delegation. He wrote about it in an Op-Ed published in the\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>on Nov. 30 entitled “I\u2019ve seen 21 years of COP failures. Paris needs to deliver action, not talk.”<\/a><\/p>\n From the text of the Op-Ed:<\/p>\n It was December 2009. I remember sitting on a plane on my way to Copenhagen. I wondered if this would be the historic moment when the world came to its senses.<\/p>\n There was hope in the air. Indeed, I was greeted by stickers on the subway that renamed Denmark\u2019s capital \u201cHopenhagen\u201d. I smiled.<\/p>\n There was widespread anticipation \u2013 nurtured frantically by the host nation \u2013 that the UN-sponsored climate summit (COP 15) would be \u201chistoric\u201d. That the impasse on global climate change would be broken. That major CO2<\/sub> emitters \u2013 the US, EU, China, India \u2013 would agree on a meaningful binding agreement that would (a) limit their emissions, (b) support developing countries in their transition to low-emission futures, and (c) create a mechanism to assist vulnerable countries in coping with the costs of adaptation and climatic disasters that, by then, had already become inevitable.<\/p>\n