From L-R, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius, President-designate of COP21 and French President Francois Hollande react during the final plenary session at the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 12, 2015.
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Delegates had been up the past two nights pulling the deal together.
“From the very beginning the French were conscious of the Copenhagen failure”, Ibrahim said. “We will have a dialogue on how we can actually achieve the goals that we’ve set in our INDC”, De Guzman said. It would establish a hundred-billion dollar fund under which rich countries would help poorer ones cope with the consequences of climate change, like floods. “The Obama administration clearly doesn’t have the support of Congress or the American people-making the agreement nothing more than a paper tiger”. He said the climate agreement “offers the best chance we have to save the one planet we have”. Until now the line was drawn only at 2 degrees.
More than 180 countries have ready presented plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions – a breakthrough in itself after years of stalemate.
The agreement still needs to be approved by the individual governments of the countries involved. “This agreement sends a powerful signal that the world is firmly committed to a low carbon future”.
“This agreement is a turning point for a world transformation within a 1.5-2°C safe operating space on Earth”, said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center. “So we are quite satisfied with the agreement”.
Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” de Guzman, head of the delegation and vice chair of the Climate Change Commission, said they will have to ensure that laws and implementing rules are set into place after the country adopted the Paris Agreement on Saturday evening in this city.
Leading up to the negotiations and through the conference, India’s role was often made out to be as one that could either make or break the Paris negotiations.
From the outset, some criticized the deal for setting too low a bar for success.
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the last major climate deal reached in 1997, the Paris pact will also not be a fully legally binding treaty, something that would nearly certainly fail to pass the US Congress. An “error” that could have seen the United States walking away from a deal that it had worked on and negotiated assiduously.
Hi llary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s front runner for the USA presidential race, noted, however, that “the next decade of action is crucial”.
After talks that extended into early morning, the draft text showed how officials had resolved the stickiest points.
It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible. Countries are expected to submit revised INDCs by 2020, and every five years thereafter. For example, governments of developing countries were not able to address the issue because they simply didn’t have the resources to invest in efficient alternatives to traditional energy and they had their own development plans to undertake.
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Obama strode triumphantly into the Cabinet Room of the White House to declare victory in his quest for an ambitious climate agreement, after 195 nations reached an accord in a Paris suburb that commits them to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is similarly waffly on technology sharing and transfer – key concerns of developing nations such as India.
