“This is not something imposed on us”, Xie said Thursday at the Chinese pavilion at the Paris climate talks.
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The UN talks being attended by representatives of 195 nations north of Paris aim to slash greenhouse-gas emissions which trap the Sun’s heat, warming Earth’s surface and oceans and disrupting its delicate climate system.
“I was very encouraged by what I saw and I heard during the opening days of COP21”, he told a news conference at UN Headquarters in NY.
At stake is hundreds of billions of dollars that would need to start flowing from rich to developing nations from 2020.
Developing nations warned Wednesday that a bitter row over money was threatening efforts to seal a historic pact to tame global warming, as the French hosts pleaded for compromise.
On behalf of the Government of Canada, the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, congratulated Manitoba on its contributions to climate action in Canada. But if mankind keeps emitting more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, those regions will also face damaging consequences in the second half of this century, according to the report. “This is the moment”.
The Group expressed its concerns over the narrative which suggests that the world has changed since the UNFCCC was adopted in 1992 due to the dramatic economic development gains of some of the developing countries (China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and UAE among others) and hence that it is time to expand the pool of so-called “donors” of climate “aid” and to narrow the list of those eligible to receive this “support” to only the “poorest of the poor”.
“I don’t see any translation of the rhetoric of the leaders of the world into working towards tangible outcomes in Paris”.
ReutersU.S. President Barack Obama (R) meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the climate change summit in Paris, November 30, 2015.
Despite this, Obama said he believed the global political landscape was shifting, boding well for Paris and beyond.
“Canada is committed to the success of the Paris Climate Conference in achieving a fair, ambitious and effective agreement that will enable the global community to achieve the goal of limiting warming below two degrees Celsius”.
The issue of climate finance continues to be a major sticky point with the G77 and China, a group of 134 developing countries including India, strongly objecting to the attempts made by the rich nations to dilute the Convention that sought the developed countries to extend support to their poor counterparts.
“There is a growing frustration”, the European source said, with bureaucrats refusing to budge on the wording of certain sections of a draft text, but “some progress” being made elsewhere.
In any case, James Hansen, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, warned in an interview with AFP that the world would be taking a big risk by aiming at a 2 C target. “There’s a gap between what’s on the table and what we need to happen for the temperature not to grow more than two degrees (Celsius)”.
What’s worse is that the study only focused on rising global temperatures, not the impact it would have on rising sea levels, nor the increasing frequency of extreme weather events in more populated places.
“If we let ice sheets become unstable, the world may become ungovernable because the economic effect would be so great”.
The World Wide Fund for Nature’s head of delegation, Tasneem Essop, said the draft was “mostly unchanged” from when negotiators landed in Paris. “Right now, they’re still just rearranging the deck chairs on the ship to get a better view of the iceberg”.
“The process, the procedures, that ensures transparency and periodic reviews, that needs to be legally binding”, Obamasaid. “It is good to see that despite some fears the text has not ballooned further with lots of new insertions”. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna will lead Canada’s negotiating team next week.
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By the end of a day of frustratingly slow negotiations, tempers frayed. “It is unthinkable to imagine failure”.
