Paris Agreement Now
Finally, when the mood in the lobby rose, UN security officers cleared the platform and senior officials from the pioneering Paris climate talks took to the podium. For two weeks, 196 countries gathered in countless meetings, fought for dense pages of text, and looked at every semicolon. And they had finally come to an agreement. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister responsible for the exhausting talks, looked exhausted but happy, grabbing his hammer and knocking it down with a resounding breach. The Paris Agreement has finally been approved. The extension of short-term commitments in the Paris Agreement will be essential. In addition to the general and legally binding limit of 1.5°C or 2°C, the Paris governments presented non-binding national plans to reduce their emissions or limit the projected increase in their emissions in the case of small developing countries. However, the first cycle of these national plans – the so-called national contributions – in 2015, was insufficient and would lead to catastrophic warming of 3°C. Global temperatures are rising quite predictably in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. This means that there is an ultimate limit to the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere if we want to meet temperature targets: in other words, a carbon “budget” that we must stick to.
The agreement does not contain precise details on the budget, so each country must draw up plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions over time. “The Paris Agreement has proven to be inclusive and large-scale, with countries accounting for 97% of global emissions, as well as non-state actors such as businesses, local governments and financial institutions – and very resilient,” said Remy Rioux, one of the French government teams who led the discussions and is now director general of the French Development Agency. That`s precisely because it`s inclusive. The Paris Agreement is a strong signal of hope in the face of the climate emergency. No other country followed the U.S. in the deal. In fact, many others have entered the leadership vacuum, she says; The EU, China, Japan and South Korea have recently announced ambitious new targets for how quickly they will achieve net-zero emissions and are on track to achieve them. At the same time, the costs of renewable energy sources such as sun and wind have decreased, making them not only competitive, but also often cheaper than fossil energy sources. . . .
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