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The Paris agreement marks an unprecedented political recognition of the risks of climate change
来源:http://www.economist.com/news/international/21683990-paris-agreement-climate-change-talks
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作者:Econmist
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发布时间: 2015-12-12
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2192 次浏览
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The nations gathered made a historic step down a very long road
“HISTORY is here,” declared François Hollande, France’s president, on Saturday morning. The UN climate conference in Paris had run over its original deadline, and the final text had yet to be seen, but the mood among the negotiators and ministers he was addressing was buoyant. And for the rest of a long day bonhomie kept on breaking out. China’s special representative for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, gave Nicholas Stern, a British economist, a jolly embrace. When Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, gaveled the agreement through in the evening there were cheers, tears and shouts of jubilation (pictured).
The “Paris agreement”, negotiated under the aegis of the UN, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”—a more ambitious goal than had been expected. Similar ambition was apparent in the agreement’s explicit goal of having as much greenhouse gas coming out of the atmosphere as going into it in the second half of the century.
In many procedural ways, too, the agreement surpassed what had been anticipated, delivering a range of compromises that all parties could live with and a lot of observers welcomed. Before the negotiations E3G, an activist think-tank, outlined three classes of possible outcome: a lowest common-denominator “Le zombie”; a so-so “comme-çi, comme-ça”; and an all out “Va va voom”. After seeing the agreement, it put it in the last category.
None of this vooming changed the fact that current efforts being made to fight climate change fall a very long way short of Paris’s ambitious goals. The world is nearly 1°C warmer than it was in the 18th century. The efforts outlined in the pledges on climate action—“intended nationally determined contributions” that 186 of the countries at the Paris negotiations have provided—are more in line with a total warming of 3°C than one of less than 2°C, the limit that was written into previous UN documents, let alone 1.5°C.
The “Paris agreement”, negotiated under the aegis of the UN, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”—a more ambitious goal than had been expected. Similar ambition was apparent in the agreement’s explicit goal of having as much greenhouse gas coming out of the atmosphere as going into it in the second half of the century.
In many procedural ways, too, the agreement surpassed what had been anticipated, delivering a range of compromises that all parties could live with and a lot of observers welcomed. Before the negotiations E3G, an activist think-tank, outlined three classes of possible outcome: a lowest common-denominator “Le zombie”; a so-so “comme-çi, comme-ça”; and an all out “Va va voom”. After seeing the agreement, it put it in the last category.
None of this vooming changed the fact that current efforts being made to fight climate change fall a very long way short of Paris’s ambitious goals. The world is nearly 1°C warmer than it was in the 18th century. The efforts outlined in the pledges on climate action—“intended nationally determined contributions” that 186 of the countries at the Paris negotiations have provided—are more in line with a total warming of 3°C than one of less than 2°C, the limit that was written into previous UN documents, let alone 1.5°C.