Pact to be endorsed by nearly 200 governments offers best balance possible, says French foreign minister as talks on global warming conclude
scmp.com
Li Jing
December 12, 2015
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said a draft climate pact worked out after two weeks of talks in Paris was ambitious, balanced and if adopted would be a “historic turning point” to keeping temperature rises well below 2 degrees Celsius, while striving for a 1.5-degree limit.
Cracking with emotion after talks ran into a day of overtime, Fabius said the text that nearly 200 governments must now endorse constituted “the best balance possible”.
A major debating point has been a promise that developed nations should provide US$100 billion to help poorer nations deal with the consequences of climate change. Fabius said the draft text would set that figure as a floor by 2020. It also includes a five-year review system for countries setting targets to cut domestic emissions.
French President Francois Hollande said: “This text will, if you should so decide, be the first universal agreement in history on climate change.”
He told delegates that in the coming hours “you will make a choice for your country, for your continent, but also a choice for the world. It will be a major leap for mankind. History is here”.
The plenary was expected to reconvene later in the afternoon yesterday (Paris time), where ministers would make final revisions before they adopted the historical deal.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s top negotiator, refused to comment, saying he was waiting for the text to see the exact wording. A Chinese delegate said there would probably be only a few changes – if some articles crossed political red lines of some countries – before the text was adopted.
On Thursday, President Xi Jinping had a phone conversation with his US counterpart Barack Obama. Both sides agreed to “constructively manage differences” and “iron out” any disagreements on reducing emissions.
A draft universal climate accord sets a global goal of peaking global greenhouse gas emissions “as soon as possible”.
French President Francois Hollande (far left), Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon applaud a statement at the climate conference in Paris. Photo: AFP
It also calls for achieving a balance between man-made emissions and the earth’s ability to absorb them by the second half of this century.
The wording removed disputed concepts like “climate neutrality” and “emissions neutrality”, which had appeared in earlier drafts but were met with opposition from countries including China.
The draft agreement included a section on “loss and damage”, an issue pushed by small island nations and other vulnerable countries who wanted the deal to recognise that climate change would have an impact in areas that they could not adapt to.
However, an adjoining decision linked to the agreement said the loss and damage article “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation” – a key demand of the United States.
Another article of the draft agreement said that wealthy nations should continue to provide financial support for poorer countries to cope with climate change.
Activists hold up placards reading ‘Leave it in the ground’ during a demonstration on the Avenue de la Grande armee boulevard in Paris. Photo: AFP
It also said “other parties are encouraged to provide or continue to provide such support voluntarily”. That’s a new concept in the climate talks, suggesting the most advanced developing countries should also pitch in.
Another sticking point is the extent to which the final deal is legally binding. “One of the final sticking points is where to put the finance article, whether in the legally binding agreement or the decisions,” said Jake Schmidt, of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington.
Developed and developing nations have failed for decades to sign an effective universal pact to tame global warming because of divisions over how much responsibility each side should take and how much they should pay.
At the heart of any deal is cutting back or eliminating the use of coal, oil and gas for energy, which has largely powered every nation’s path towards prosperity since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s.
The burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, which cause the planet to warm and change earth’s delicate climate system. If climate change goes unabated, scientists warn of increasingly severe droughts, floods and storms, as well as rising seas that would engulf islands and populated coasts.
Written in the opaque legal language that has evolved from more than two decades of U.N. climate talks, the pact sets the world a roadmap for breaking away from the fossil fuels that have powered the global economy since the Industrial Revolution.
The new text is 31 pages, against 27 on Thursday and more than 50 at the start of the talks.
National delegations have broken up to review the text, with hopes high that they will return to a formal session to adopt it later on Saturday.
Following are details of the new draft:
Finance
In non-binding decisions that accompany the binding text, the agreement says governments shall set by 2025 “a new collective quantified goal from a floor of $100 billion per year, taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries”. As a continued promise from 2009, developed nations will mobilise money to help developing nations limit their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to more floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.
Long-term goal (Degrees)
In 2010, the U.N. climate summit in Mexico adopted a goal of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, a level that scientists say could be a tipping point for the climate. Global average surface temperatures have already risen by about 1.0 Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit).
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.
They found support from more than 100 nations, including the European Union and the United States, which formed a “high ambition coalition”.
Saudi Arabia and other nations resisted, saying there was insufficient research to support a tougher target and that setting too ambitious a figure could endanger food security.
The final draft text aims to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, recognising that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.
Long-term goal (Emissions)
Negotiators have struggled with how to phrase an aspirational longer-term goal for halting emissions, a symbolic but still potent message about how they see the world’s energy system transforming over the rest of this century.
Some of the most vulnerable nations and non-governmental organisations had campaigned for a clear, quantified goal for eliminating or reducing fossil fuel use by the middle of the century.
China and India, heavily dependent on coal, are among those reluctant to set clear dates for giving up fossil fuels they see as vital to lifting millions from poverty. Saudi Arabia, whose economy also depends on oil, is also a clear opponent.
The European Union, although keen to lead on climate had a problem with the word decarbonisation because of Poland, whose economy depends on coal.
As negotiations wore on, the options grew vaguer. By Thursday evening, the goal was greenhouse gas neutrality, a phrasing that confounded some climate experts, but avoided the word decarbonisation.
The final text said nations must “aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognising that peaking will take longer for developing country parties”.
It said that to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out by the deal, parties will aim to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Analysts at the talks interpreted the text as implying net zero emissions.
Loss and damage
Developing nations want a long-term mechanism to help them cope with loss and damage from disasters such as typhoons or the impacts of a creeping rise of sea level rise. All governments set up a loss and damage mechanism in 2013, but it has so far done little.
Earlier drafts recognised the importance of averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage, but offered divergent options, including one that left out the mechanism.
An existing international mechanism to deal with the unavoidable losses and damages caused by climate change, such as creeping deserts and rising seas, is anchored in the draft final deal.
A promise that it will not be used as a basis for “liability and compensation” — a demand from the United States that proved divisive — has been moved to a set of accompanying decisions in a compromise.
Raising ambition
Well before the Paris talks began, it was clear that the promises made by 186 nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020, the backbone of the Paris accord, were too weak to limit rising temperatures to the agreed 2 degrees Celsius level.
Negotiators knew going in there would have to be a system for “ratcheting up” national measures, but how and when to do that has been a sticking point throughout.
Frequent reviews have been a major demand from negotiating blocs such as the European Union, but China in particular said it cannot commit to more aggressive action quickly because Beijing has already set domestic goals out to 2030.
In line with a date mooted in the previous draft on Thursday, the new draft text schedules a “first global stocktake in 2023” and every five years thereafter unless otherwise decided.
Carbon markets
The draft legal text contains no explicit mention of carbon markets, nor of the possibility of carbon penalties for aviation and shipping. It does, however, include a reference to the “use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes,” which could allow nations on a voluntary basis to offset their own emissions by buying credits from other nations.
Differentiation
Developing nations say that rich nations, as defined in a 1992 Convention, should continue to take the lead in cutting emissions and providing finance. Developed nations argue that many of these countries, such as Singapore and South Korea, have since become wealthy and should do more.
The new text says developed countries shall provide financial resources to assist developing countries and “other parties are encouraged to provide or continue to provide such support voluntarily”.
Additional reporting by Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
