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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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2194 次浏览
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According to John Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, delivering a warming of “well below” 2°C requires that global carbon-dioxide emissions peak “well before 2030” and “should be eliminated as soon as possible after 2050”. That would represent a rate of “decarbonisation” (a word not to be found in the agreement, thanks to the sensitivities of Saudi Arabia and some other countries) far greater than the world has yet seen.
There are processes in the agreement designed to ratchet up the level of global action, but although they are more demanding than some had expected, they are not in themselves enough to make good the current gap. The agreement requires countries to act on climate change, and to increase their actions over time, but it says nothing concrete about how much anyone has to do. The hope is that with the whole world now on a settled course, with ever better technology and with a much greater flow of financing to developing countries, the ambition of these contributions, which will be revisited after “stocktakes” every five years, will quickly grow. The first such reckoning will be in 2018.
Genuine concern about the climate, public opinion and international pressure produced the pledges that were made for Paris. The hope is that similar bottom-up processes, rather than unenforceable UN mandates, will drive up the level of action in decades to come. The process should be helped by a more predictable stream of money from richer countries to poorer ones—as should efforts to adapt to the climate change that is not avoided. The Paris agreement requires a flow of $100 billion a year from developed countries to developing countries by 2020, with the sum to be revisited in 2025. It also requires them to make their plans for this money clear every couple of years.
Throughout the Paris conference, developed countries said they accepted their obligation to lead such efforts. One of the products of the two weeks of negotiations was that the agreement now “encourages” other nations to pitch in, too, should they be well-enough off to do so. This may not sound a big deal. But a sharp distinction between developed and developing countries has long been a sticking point in climate negotiations, with large developing countries like China (the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide) and India keen not to be treated in the same way as developed countries. The wording that encourages them to play a role in finance is one of a number of ways the Paris agreement found to move beyond that distinction. The fact that all nations are to make contributions on an increasingly equal basis was what justified Mr Hollande’s praise of the agreement as the first of its kind to be universal.