With 2015 forecast to be the hottest year on record, world leaders and scientists had said the accord was vital for capping rising temperatures and averting the most calamitous impacts from climate change.
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“Climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet”, the preface to the draft accord says.
“This would be the first time that there is a prominent reference to “loss and damage”, and that it is being defined as a common task to be tackled together in the future, ” said Sabine Minninger who is in charge of climate politics at the Protestant Development Service, also called Bread for the World.
The draft, completed after negotiations that stretched through the night, was being translated before being presented to global delegates.
United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon was also at the conference to add his voice to the high-level calls to land the deal. “For that, we need all hands on deck”. “The Paris climate accord is adopted”, Fabius declared.
The burning of those fossil fuels releases invisible greenhouse gases, which cause the planet to warm and change Earth’s delicate climate system.
The final version of the Paris climate change deal is being published this morning.
In the years-long quest for a pact to commit all the world’s nations to greenhouse gas curbs, Beijing and New Delhi have often clashed with the United States and other developed nations in the UN climate forum.
Analysts said the delay until Saturday was not necessarily a bad sign. “Little things can happen, but we think it’s teed up”, Kerry told reporters. Vulnerable countries – in particular island nations – fought for the provision despite heavy opposition from the United States, which sought to make it explicit that such a process will never result in requests for “compensation”.
“Whereas we left Copenhagen scared of what comes next, we’ll leave Paris inspired to keep fighting”, said David Turnbull, director at Oil Change International, a research and advocacy organisation opposed to fossil fuel production.
But many vulnerable, low-lying nations like the Marshall Islands say that a full 2 degrees Celsius rise would endanger their very existence as sea levels rise, and pushed hard for setting a goal to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Capping the increase in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was organizers’ key goal going into the COP21 That level of warming is measured as the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
The target of well below 2 degrees Celsius and even more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius was originally expected not to be to the liking of developing countries like India and China who are major emitters on account of industrialisation but Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar was effusive in his welcome of the 31-page document.
Delegates applauded the start of the meeting of the Paris Committee at the two-week talks, which have overrun their official Friday evening deadline.
The U.S. and European countries want to move away from so-called “differentiation” among economies and want big emerging countries like China and India to pitch in more in a final climate deal.
It says the parties to the pact will “undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century”.
The talks are the culmination of years of UN-led efforts to create a long-term climate deal.
And the £65 billion per year fund on offer from rich to poor countries (to help adapt to climate change and invest in clean energy technology) has now been set as a floor.
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The U.S. resisted legally binding emissions targets because of opposition in a Republican-controlled Congress. Instead U.S. negotiators wanted robust transparency rules to make sure countries live up to their commitments.
