The crew of the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy, in the midst of their ICESCAPE mission, retrieves supplies in the Arctic Ocean in this July 12, 2011 NASA handout photo.
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The historic agreement, reached in Paris after years of negotiations, provides a pathway for countries to reduce emissions so that the global temperature rise is kept below 2 degrees Celsius.
“This is not a good deal for our island nations, at least not yet, ” the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, Nauru President Baron Divavesi Waqa, told the gathering.
Countries that sign the deal must now approve formally amongst their own governments.
It’s worth mentioning that China and the United States together account for 38 percent of global emissions.
US President Barack Obama is keen for the new agreement to take effect before he leaves office next January.
Scientists said the monthly global temperature record has kept being broken over the past 11 months, and that 2015 has become the planet’s warmest year since the late 19th century.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this is a moment in history, in which you are signing a new covenant with the future. They said that the Paris accord was carefully crafted to make sure that signatories could have it approved without encountering complicated political arguments in their countries.
“The next step is for more of the operational details to be fleshed out so New Zealand can consider timing and the best way to ratify the agreement”, Mrs Bennett says.
The world leaders signed the initiative accompanied by 197 children, the same number of members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “We need to ensure that our words become actions”. Other agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, were held up in the past because of the various procedures and internal politics involved in the ratification process in each country. Kyoto was dedicated exclusively to developed nations, saying that these countries were the ones that needed to do something about the climate change, cutting greenhouse gas emission, unlike the Paris Agreement which involves both rich and poor.
It was the biggest ever day one endorsement of a global agreement.
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Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan represented Singapore at the signature ceremony of the Paris Agreement on climate change at the United Nations in NY, announced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) on Saturday (Apr 23).
