Climate Change Summit in Paris

It will work alongside a private sector initiative spearheaded by Bill Gates and backed by other billionaire business leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Branson. Twenty countries, including the UK, US, China and India, will double their clean energy research and development investment over five years.

The biggest issue at the summit is who should bear most of the burden of closing that gap: wealthy Western nations that have polluted the most historically, or developing countries like China and India that are now the biggest and third-biggest emitters of greenhouse gases?

Paris – President Jacob Zuma on Monday urged delegates at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change Convention (COP 21) in Paris to deliver a legally binding agreement which would be fair to developing nations.

As the summit opened, organisers of 2,300 events around the world at the weekend, calling for action on climate change, said more than three-quarters of a million people had taken part in 175 countries. These targets are in the climate action plans that every country has submitted, called the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs.

Obama listed several criteria for a potential agreement, including an “ambitious target” to reduce carbon output, a slate of tools to measure countries’ progress and a “legally binding” mechanism to ensure countries adhere to their carbon reduction commitments.

The negotiators from 195 countries are working off a document that is more than 50 pages long.

While I think advocates should be wary of drawing too direct a causal link between climate change and conflicts like the one in Syria, climate change is a macro trend that “effects all trends”, as the president put it Tuesday.

Republicans have also threatened to undermine the United States’ participation in a climate accord by withholding funding for global climate initiatives and threatening to oppose any proposal that could be sent to Congress for ratification.

“Obama today met with the heads of small-island states, who are among the most threatened from climate change”. “In fact, they can be mutually reinforcing”, Rhodes said. He went on to say that worldwide negotiating partners in Paris “should proceed with caution before entering into an unattainable deal with this administration”.

While some are still skeptical, evidence supporting the reality of climate change is mounting.

This time, Xinhua Net states that the meeting reportedly aims to produce a new worldwide agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses beyond 2020 when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires.