Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama submitted their acceptance of the agreement to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is also in China.
Advertisement
“This is not a fight any one country, no matter how powerful, can take alone”. He said of the Paris agreement: “Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally chose to save our planet”.
Speaking to a business forum on the eve of a summit of leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies in Hangzhou, Xi said the G20 should combine monetary and fiscal policies with structural reforms to promote growth, and warned that isolationism could not resolve problems faced by the global economy.
The announcement, which comes as heads of the G20 leading group of nations meet in China, means the Paris Agreement- drawn up in the French capital last December – comes closer to being adopted.
The agreement will take effect 30 days after the date when 55 countries representing at least 55% of global emissions have formally joined it.
Until Saturday only 24 of the signatories had ratified the accord, including France and many island states threatened by rising sea levels but who only produce a tiny proportion of the world’s emissions. And the countries that join must account for at least 55 percent of the world’s emissions.
CO2 emissions are the driving force behind climate change.
U.S. President Barack Obama said it was time for America to “put its money where it’s mouth is” and that “history will judge today’s effort as pivotal”.
Xi said the announcement “hopefully will encourage other countries to take similar actions”.
“I look forward to having, continuing to have, extremely productive conversations with my provincial counterparts as we demonstrate Canada’s genuine and deep leadership on the climate change file”, he said.
He added that tackling climate change would take more than just signing the agreement, saying: ‘World leaders need to turn their Paris rhetoric into reality to speed up the transition to a low carbon world which is safe for everyone’.
Ratifying the agreement is in China’s interests and will help the country “play a bigger role in global climate governance”, according to the proposal.
“An area which I believe will engage their attention is how we govern the way global finance institutions work to support development; how we provide a delicate balance between growth and development”, he said.
His agenda includes remarks on global warming and a meeting with host Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In its Paris commitment, the United States promised to cut its own emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Advertisement
The United States is also expected to announce that it is formally joining the Paris Agreement. “After the Chinese Foreign Minister’s (Wang Yi) visit to India (in August), the two sides have agreed to establish a new channel to touch upon all these kind of issues”, Hu Shisheng, director, Institute of South and Southeast Asian and Oceanian Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank, told IANS. In a statement, he said when China and the USA came “together to take action on climate, it moves the needle in a way that no two other nations can accomplish”.
