Hollande arrived in China on Monday for a meeting with president Xi Jinping meant to shore up Chinese support for next month’s climate talks.
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“Yes, failure is still possible, but today I am confident”, said Hollande.
She said Beijing had not previously spelt out its hopes for monitoring any deal in Paris.
According to Cyril Cassisa, a project manager for the French energy consultant Enerdata who was recently working on climate issues for French foreign affairs in Beijing, Hollande’s trip to China shows he is communicating with the Chinese. “France wants this agreement on the climate to succeed, but we also want to bring all of our companies to what will be a big reconversion of the Chinese economy”.
In Monday’s statement, China appeared to broadly back that concept, with the two sides agreeing that countries should “take stock” every five years of their progress in reaching long-term goals, with a view to “regularly enhancing their actions in a nationally determined manner”.
Hollande said Xi confirmed that he would attend the opening of the conference, which runs through December 11.
China will be a key player at the event, which opens on November 30, in the face of disputes over whether developed or developing countries should bear more of the burden for reducing emissions.
Beijing, which was blamed for scuppering a 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, has already promised in 2014 that carbon dioxide emissions would peak “by around 2030” in a symbolic announcement in June.
The EU’s climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Canete, said in a social media message the declaration was a “very important step forward on the way to an ambitious deal in Paris”. But a draft text of the Paris deal is unclear about how the pledges will be tracked.
Li said more environmentally friendly development would be “obligatory” for China to “promote a restructuring of its national economy”, now experiencing its slowest growth in years. It has also seen a decline in coal consumption and has become a leader in renewable energy.
The main aim of the Paris talks is to strike an agreement that will keep the rise in average global temperatures below two degrees, but the Deputy CEO of the Climate Institute, Erwin Jackson, said that was never really the reality.
The veteran negotiator also said that “it was good to see a clear focus on needing to do a stocktake before 2020” in the statement jointly released by French and Chinese authorities.
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ERWIN JACKSON: No, I think we’ve got away from the concept that punitive compliance mechanisms under an agreement like the Kyoto Protocol are actually going to work – they haven’t.
