Climate change is the subject, and how we’ll mitigate damage is the talk that surrounds it. A total of 195 nations gathered this week to chop through planned global agreements to fight global warming.
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The first draft of the Paris Outcome, prepared after two days of high-level ministerial deliberations, was released by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius yesterday at a crucial climate change conference.
The latest draft is slightly shorter than previous drafts and has lost most of its “square brackets” which denote disagreement.
Many nations vulnerable to climate change want to limit warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
Below you’ll see a video presented by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change official called “Women for Climate Action at COP21.” .
The latest draft offers a compromise that states the goal of the agreement is to hold temperatures to well below 2C, but to aim for 1.5C.
As negotiations grind down to the last day on Friday, the hopes for an agreement seemed to be stuck on one major point-money.
“With this, I would be able to go home and tell my people that our chance for survival is not lost”, said Tony de Brum, Foreign Affairs Minister of the Marshall Islands, one of the archipelagic nations that could be wiped out by rising sea levels.
“I hope, I hope that tomorrow we will have finished”, Mr Fabius said.
Perhaps the biggest difference revolves around how to come up with the billions of dollars needed to help developing countries grow their economies without burning through vast reserves of fossil fuels.
The US wants words such as loss, damage, or compensation to be left out of the final document, in case it might interpreted as an invitation to launch legal action against American multinationals.
However, negotiators are predicting that the talks will not end today and would drag into the weekend, despite the positive signs that a deal may be hammered out soon.
Speaking from the COP21 conference, Euronews reporter Grégoire Lory said: “For NGOs, this last draft agreement is nearly too good to be true because it contains many key elements that have been demanded”.
Ed Fast, the Conservative environment critic who only a couple of months ago was working the global power corridors as Canada’s worldwide trade minister, said the Liberals are discovering the many competing interests involved in the climate file.
Javadekar, also asked whether there was pressure imposed upon India by the U.S. in the full meeting in the morning, said: “India does not take any pressure”, adding though that it was ready to engage on all issues.
The diplomat said a new draft of the accord is expected to be released sometime Thursday. Sierra emphasizes that a key component of the plan going into Paris was to build momentum through “bilateral talks [that] will allow countries to build support for their own domestic programs by increasingly showing others that they are not ‘going it alone'”. Negotiators have yet to iron out an agreement on how to handle unavoidable impacts from climate change.
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However, scientific analyses show the emissions targets that more than 180 countries have presented won’t be enough to limit warming even to 2 degrees C. The draft invited governments to “update” their emissions targets every five years, but didn’t require them to improve them. No details of the meetings were immediately available but Brazil and India are among the biggest nations demanding that richer countries pay and do more to reduce carbon emissions.
