‘I now invite the COP to adopt the document the Paris Agreement, I see no objections, ‘ French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced.
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The historic agreement sets a goal of keeping the global average temperature from increasing more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, with an eye toward a more ambitious aim of holding to less than 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
Getting to an agreement that the world’s countries can vote on is incredibly impressive and will give the global community a common goal of fighting climate change-something the world desperately needs.
“This is the culmination of a deliberate and patient strategy to fundamentally change the global dynamic on climate change”, a senior administration official said.
“The world has come together around an agreement that will empower us to charter a new path for our planet”, he said. The United States of America has already reduced its emissions more than any other country in the world.
Countries submitted their individual plans to slash targets before arriving in Paris, which took them off the table during the two weeks of negotiations.
Earlier, French President Francois Hollande called the proposals unprecedented, while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on negotiators to “finish the job”. Under the deal, governments have to assess and resubmit their emission targets every five years, starting in 2023. The agreement says these targets should be greater than the current ones and “reflect [the] highest possible amibition”.
The U.S.is the world’s second largest climate polluter, and Obama has pledged that the U.S. will cut its overall emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2030.
The last stumbling blocks were over money, specifically how to structure hundreds of billions of dollars in funding from rich nations to poor ones to help them adapt to climate change.
The world will look to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degreesFahrenheit, compared to pre-industrial levels.
A person records with a selfie-stick a demonstration of activists of environmental organization Greenpeace at the venue of the COP21 United Nations climate change conference in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris, on December 11, 2015.
Representatives from nearly 200 countries have approved a landmark climate accord in an attempt to stave off the most catastrophic consequences of global warming. But those pledges are not enough to achieve the goals in the accord, meaning countries will need to cut much more to meet the goal.
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The agreement commits all nations to cooperating to address a wide range of ways in which poor and developing nations deal with climate-change effects – whether from extreme storms or “slow onset events” like rising seas – an idea called “loss and damage”.
