“Let’s secure an agreement that builds in ambition”, Obama said on November 30. But while those nations celebrated the inclusion of that 1.5 degree target, it is more aspirational than practical.
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As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said: “The work starts now”.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the “big step forward” the agreement signals for tackling climate change and reaffirmed the Scottish Government’s commitment to dealing with the issue. With 2015 forecast to be the hottest year on record, world leaders and scientists have warned the accord is vital for capping rising temperatures and averting the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
The main dispute in Paris centered over how to anchor the climate targets in a binding worldwide pact, with China and other major developing countries insisting on different rules for rich and poor nations.
It softened that requirement for countries with longer-term plans extending to 2030, such as China, which had resisted revisiting its goal before then.
Now they have been promised United States $100bn (£67bn) a year by 2020 – not as much as many countries would like.
A similar 2009 climate change summit meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, collapsed in acrimonious failure after countries could not unite around a deal.
The global agreement was gavelled through more than 24 hours after the official end of the fortnight-long conference in the French capital, following days and nights of shuttle diplomacy and wrangling between countries.
“We have saved Tuvalu, and in doing so we have saved the world”, Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry said.
The high degree of unity among developing countries in the G77+China group, and especially between India and China within the Like Minded Developing Countries, ensured that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities got embedded in different pillars of the agreement ensuring that the developed world would still be taking the lead and that the burden on the developing world to fight climate change would not be more onerous than that of the developed world. Its envoy, Paul Oquist, said the agreement does not go far enough to cut global warming and help the poor countries affected by it.
Transparency is key to making sure all this remains on track, with countries reporting their emissions accurately.
Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said the deal would put pressure on Cameron to provide more support for renewable energy over new gas plants. The agreement, which 196 gathered countries agreed to, promises to keep the rise of global temperatures far below 2 degrees by the turn of the century, and try possibly to keep it below 1.5 degree. A climate march was organized by several NGOs as COP21 negotiations come to an end.
Some scientists who had criticized earlier drafts as unrealistic praised the final pact for including language that essentially means the world will have to all but stop polluting with greenhouse gases by 2070 to reach the 2-degree goal, or by 2050 to reach the 1.5-degree goal.
By the second half of this century, there must be a balance between the emissions from human activity such as energy production and farming, and the amount that can be captured by carbon-absorbing “sinks” such as forests or carbon storage technology. The United States had also pushed for the creation of an outside panel of experts – a sort of “carbon auditor” to verify nations’ emissions reductions.
With that the delegates achieved what had been unreachable for two decades: a consensus on the need to move away from carbon-based fuels and a plan for the 195 nations to do so.
The IEA congratulates all Parties, under the leadership of the French Presidency, for the successful conclusion of the landmark Paris Agreement. Negotiations that involve almost 200 nations are always challenging.
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The French president says “the 12th of December, 2015, will remain a great date for the planet”. But deeper still, the Paris Agreement is a victory for the basic idealist notion that countries with diverse and competing priorities can find non-zero-sum solutions to the world’s most complex problems. “Today, it has played host to one of the most positive global steps in history”.
