New America's Climate Policy Program was a major organizer and sponsor of the Governors' Global Climate Summit, held Nov. 18-19 in Los Angeles, which broght together leaders from the United States, Canada, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the EU and other key regions of the world. Via taped message, President-Elect Obama used the summit to make his first statement on climate change -- declaring that he would establish annual targets to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them another 80 percent by 2050.

The historic summit provided the opportunity for states and provinces to reach specific agreements on climate solutions and actions and essentially create a blueprint for the next global agreement on climate change. Two key highlights of summit involved the signing of cooperative agreements between the participating leaders to start implementing solutions immediately:

1. A Memorandum of Understanding to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation between California, Illinois and Wisconsin and states from Indonesia and Brazil.
2. The Summit Declaration, which commits signers to establishing and expanding existing global networks to help develop additional cooperative actions throughout the world. Twenty-seven global leaders from six countries signed the declaration, acknowledging the threats of global warming on natural resources and economic prosperity, and calling on states and provinces to build and strengthen cooperative efforts to implement strategies that can immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions in advance of the next global agreement on climate change.

Most critical, leaders at the Governors' Summit committed to establishing workgroups by sector to develop individual sector-specific position papers within the next six months on possible policy options to inform and advance United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change international negotiations toward the next global climate agreement.