Hollande clashes with Kerry over legally binding climate deal at Cop21

For good reason: More than two decades of United Nations climate summit meetings have yielded limited results. No legally binding climate treaty has been signed since the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which imposed binding emissions targets on those countries that ratified it – though the U.S. never did this.

The goal of the Paris talks is “to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 36 Fahrenheit.

Loss and damage goes “beyond adaptation”, said Amjad Abdulla, a Maldivian minister who will represent the Alliance of Small Island States as its chief negotiator in Paris.

Maxime Combes, a member of the global civil society coalition Climate Justice Now, spoke at the November 8 pre-conference ministerial meeting attended by Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna.

Climate acitivists image via Shutterstock.

Developing countries should receive the support they require to make the transition to a low carbon economy and to adapt to the reality of a climate that is already changing and the loss and damage that is associated with this, Zuma said.

The report said that climate change is already preventing people from escaping poverty, and without rapid, inclusive and climate-smart development, together with emissions-reductions efforts that protect the poor; there could be more than 100 million additional people in poverty by 2030.

The “review clause”, the terms of which are under negotiation, will allow the contributions submitted by each country to be “regularly reviewed to arrive at this path: no more than 2C of global warming”, insisted Hollande.

Around 50 pilgrims have set off from central London this morning at the start of a 200-mile journey to Paris where they will call on world leaders from 190 nations at the UN Climate Change Conference – COP21 – to agree “a fair, ambitious and binding” agreement on tackling climate change.

When asked which institutions had made the biggest contributions to advancing climate change solutions over the past five years, just 14 percent of the experts polled said that national government made a “large” or “very large” contribution – the lowest rating of any institution. “That is what we are working for”.

“It is clear from our research that business leaders increasingly see climate change through the lens of fundamental disruption in their industries, and that leading companies are approaching climate change as an opportunity for growth, innovation and competitive advantage”.

Kerry, interviewed by the Financial Times earlier this week, had said: “It’s definitively not going to be a treaty…”

“I know how hard it is”, Hollande said, in an apparent reference to Republican opposition to climate change action in the US.

It’s an worldwide example of the Obama administration’s belief that clean energy technology eventually will help limit the effects of climate change.

“The Paris agreement will fulfil this”. Instead, it puts us on a much more reasonable “payment plan” meant to shift us away from dependence on fossil fuels, to more (and eventually complete) reliance on renewable energy sources, so that we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2030, the United Kingdom will have halved its emissions compared with 1990 and is on track to meet the target, set out in law, of an 80 per cent reduction by 2050.