Maritime disputes were also not on the agenda of a meeting between Xi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo, held on Friday.
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Xi said China’s new mechanisms and initiatives were “not meant to reinvent the wheels or target any other country”, but to improve the current global mechanisms to achieve common development.
“This is the single best chance that we have to deal with a problem that could end up transforming this planet in a way that makes it very hard for us to deal with all the other challenges that we may face”, Mr. Obama said in Hangzhou, where China is hosting the G20 summit for the first time.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with U.S. President Barack Obama, who is here to attend the G20 summit, in Hangzhou, capital city of east China’s Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016.
Alden Meyer, worldwide director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Paris agreement’s detailed rules will likely take another year or two to finalise. Once the deal has been ratified, countries have to wait a minimum of three years to exit. Through July, wind power has grown by another 19 GW and solar PV by 20 GW, making this year likely to be another record-breaking year.
The US action plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) in the United Nations jargon, sets a goal to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent by 2025 against a 2005 baseline.
Although an exact estimate of carbon dioxide emitted by China is hard to ascertain because of uncertainties and periodic revisions of official statistics, some scientists have argued that the country’s emissions may already have peaked in 2014 – a year before it even announced its target.
Greenpeace UK chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said: ‘This move from the world’s largest carbon emitters takes the Paris climate deal much closer to the critical threshold for adoption.
“This is something we must pay great attention to”, he said.
Trudeau did not explicitly reference Donald Trump’s populist campaign for the United States presidency, but alluded to the Republican nominee’s platform as he argued for the benefits of free trade.
Chinese state media reported the deal had been ratified because it would help “safeguard environmental security” and was “conducive to China’s development interests”. He is due to speak on the subject later Saturday before meeting with the Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Obama similarly underlined how the agreement was in USA economic and security interests.
“This is not a fight that any one country no matter how powerful can take alone”, Obama said, according to Sky News.
“We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is”.
The president plans to use the trip to highlight his work on climate change.
The Australian government said Wednesday it would seek to ratify the Paris Agreement on climate change by the end of the year.
Altogether, countries representing about 40 percent of global emissions have ratified the agreement since it was first signed in December, with several other countries on track to do so in the coming months, Deese said.
The two countries are the world’s largest emitters, with the United States accounting for 17.9 percent of gases and another 20.1 percent coming from China.
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Xi also called on other countries to push for ratification.
