Both UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and French President Francois Hollande asked member nations to come together to adopt the agreement. He said the world can be more confident this planet is going to be in better shape for the next generation.
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The new version removed disputed concepts like “climate neutrality” or “emissions neutrality” which had appeared in earlier drafts but met opposition from countries including China.
However, Tim Gore of OxFam criticized some of the financial provisions and said it still left some of the people most impacted by climate change vulnerable. Actual dollar amounts were kept out of the agreement itself, but wealthy nations had previously pledged to provide $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. “This is quite encouraging”, he said, adding that municipal and business leaders as well as civil society organizations were also at the conference to play a role.
French officials say any agreement won’t take effect until 2020.
Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The wheel of climate action turns slowly, but in Paris it has turned”.
After weeks of negotiations diplomats in France unveiled a landmark deal to tackle climate change and reduce greenhouse gases.
“This deal alone won’t dig us out the hole we’re in, but it makes the sides less steep”, he said.
Fabius said the “final draft” would retain a long-term goal of keeping the overall global temperature rise from pre-industrial times to the end of this century “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Laurent Fabius, the summit’s president, is France’s minister of foreign affairs, a higher rank than the ministers of environment who presided over most recent summits.
Within minutes of its adoption, US Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the pact would “prevent the worst, most devastating consequences of climate change from ever happening”.
It also lists 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) as an aspirational goal, but leaves a lot of the decision-making for that until a future date.
If the 190 nations gathered in Paris agree to an accord, it would be a breakthrough.
“All the conditions are there for us to reach a universal, ambitious agreement”, said Fabius.
“This is huge: nearly every country in the world just signed on to the #ParisAgreement on climate change – thanks to American leadership”, U.S. President Barack Obama wrote on Twitter. In 1997, the COP talks resumed in the Kyoto Protocol treaty where 37 industrial nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2012.
An activist joins others to form a giant red line during a demonstration near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on December 12, 2015, as a proposed 195-nation accord on climate change is presented at a UN conference in Le Bourget.
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If adopted, the accord aims to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius. Reproduction of the Eiffel tower in the background.
