World leaders in bid to keep Paris climate accord alive
FOLLOWING a cascade of grim reports on the gathering pace of global warming, Fiji’s prime minister yesterday appealed for urgent action on climate change at UN negotiations in Bonn.
“The need for urgency is obvious,” Frank Bainimarama said.
“Our world is in distress from extreme weather events caused by climate change -- destructive hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts, melting ice and changes to agriculture that threaten our food security,” he told the opening plenary of the 12-day talks, over which he will preside.
“Our collective plea for the world is to maintain the course we set in Paris,” he said, referring to the 196-nation treaty inked in 2015.
But five months after US President Donald Trump said he would yank the United States out of that pact, diplomats and leaders are still wondering to what extent he would make their jobs more difficult.
The Paris treaty calls for capping global warming at well under 2°C , and 1.5°C if possible.
So far, Earth’s average temperature has gone up 1°C compared to pre-industrial levels -- enough to wreak havoc in many parts of the world.
Voluntary national pledges to reduce carbon pollution would still see the world heat up by a blistering 3°C, leaving a critical emissions gap, and very little time to fill it.
“We have less than three years left to bend the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions downward to avoid the very worst and most catastrophic impacts of climate change,” Paula Caballero, global director for climate at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based policy think-tank, said.
That daunting task has been made all the more difficult by the US pullout, diplomats and experts said.
The problem extends beyond the likely shortfall in the reduction of US emissions, despite Trump’s vow to protect carbon-intensive, coal-fired power plants from closure.
The concern is more whether other leaders who were already reluctant to foreswear fossil fuels as the main engine of economic growth for their countries will lose resolve.
“It will be important to listen to ministers, to see how determined they are, and whether there will be any back-sliding,” European Climate Foundation president Laurence Tubiana said.
As France’s climate ambassador in 2015, she was one of the Paris Agreement’s main architects.
The Bonn meeting, she noted, was supposed to be mostly technical, a chance to complete a complicated rule book for implementing the treaty’s provisions.
“But with the US decision, it has in fact become an important political moment,” Tubiana said.
Washington has kept a low profile going into the Bonn talks.
“The United States will participate in the 23rd meeting of the Conference of the Parties,” a State Department official said.
At the same time, the administration’s position on the Paris Agreement remains unchanged, the official said.
Leaders from a score of nations are expected to take part in the 12-day talks running until November 17. – AFP