Sleepless, Tense Climate Negotiators Haggle Over Paris Deal

“The 1.5-degree targets mean that we need even greater reductions”, he said from Paris.

“While we welcome this increase in ambition, we would like to draw the attention of the climate negotiators to the need to allocate the remaining carbon budget in a fair manner to all countries so that there is a chance for meeting this temperature target”, said the three experts T Jayaraman, professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Anand Patwardhan, professor at the University of Maryland and IIT-Bombay and Chandra Bhushan, Deputy Director General, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

While the plans discussed at the climate conference only predict holding off the temperature rise to 2.7-3.5 degrees Celsius, it is still an improvement from the six-degree rise the planet will be headed toward by the end of the century if no action is taken, according to Independent news.

China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, has pledged to peak its emissions “by approximately 2030 or sooner”.

Clear choices now face ministers at COP21 on all of the key issues – including whether to set the long-term goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees, or a more ambitious 1.5 degrees – following the publication of a much sharper negotiating text by the French presidency of this crucial climate summit.

Kerry made the announcement in a speech to the climate conference outside Paris.

The verification mechanism is seen as necessary because, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which required industrialized countries to reduce their emissions, the prospective agreement is not expected to oblige countries to achieve their emissions targets.

United Nations talks in Paris are entering penultimate day of official negotiations, with efforts to break divisions on key issues in the agreement which aims to avoid risky climate change and provide finance for poor countries to deal with the impacts of global warming.

The new Liberal government came to office last month promising a renewed national priority on combating climate change, with both Trudeau and McKenna winning global plaudits for providing Canada with a new perspective.

Yet the formation of the coalition – with rich, poor, big and small countries- casts a shadow over the negotiating group known as G77 and China, consisting of 133 developing countries.

The publication of the new draft comes after the United States aligned itself with the “high ambition coalition” of countries calling for a strong deal on tackling climate change at the negotiations by 195 countries. Many sticking points remain among delegations over which countries should take the most responsibility for fighting man-made global warming.

It also termed as “disappointing” the issue of finance, saying while developed countries failed to fulfil their obligations, they are also trying to “shift” their responsibility to developing nations.

A new version of the draft text is expected to emerge in the evening on Thursday, which Fabius said should be the “penultimate” text, meaning it should only lead to the final agreement.

Developments in Paris moved quickly on Wednesday, with Secretary of State John Kerry calling for a legally binding transparent system of monitoring nations’ progress towards their climate commitments.

The demand has not had too much traction in the past but it changed in Paris and the demand has got grown here. On technology, he said agreement in Paris would send “the marketplace an extraordinary signal” of commitment to clean energy and thereby spark a flood of capital into the sector. The new draft, released on Wednesday, omitted the paragraph. The world’s number one emitter and second largest economy has managed to negotiate its way out of having to pay any money to those nations suffering the consequences of Climate Change.

The conference is due to wrap up on Friday, but there’s speculation talks could run over time despite the French insisting that won’t happen.

“To do this we are building personal bonds between us as ministers, forging a joint resolve to fight together”.