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At long last, a climate change agreement After a fortnight of protracted and tense negotiations in December, the United Nations climate talks in Paris finally resulted in an accord. While it offers a glimmer of hope in tackling the critical problem of global warming threatening planetary survival, the new climate treaty fails to impose legally binding obligations on developed countries to curb carbon emissions to limit global temperature rise below the critical threshold of 2øC and to provide financial assistance necessary for developing countries to meet the challenges of climate change. Gurdial Singh Nijar appraises the Paris Agreement. PERHAPS the newly minted climate change agreement will immortalise Paris as the 1942 Humphrey Bogart movie did Casablanca. This city of love delivered where Copenhagen and others failed. On 12 December, after two weeks of intense and often rancorous overnight negotiations, the French presidency overseeing the negotiations at the 21st meeting of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change gavelled the Paris Agreement. It took four years to realise the 2011 Durban mandate to craft this legally effective document to enhance the implementation of the Convention. It could not have come any earlier. Scientists have long warned that fossil fuel burning has to be cut. Otherwise the global warming the carbon emissions cause would see the manifold increase of even greater calamities and havoc and destroy the world as we know it. Melting glaciers will swallow small island states, and threaten agriculture and food security. The emissions have been accumulating since the developed world embarked on the Industrial Revolution beginning in the 1700s, burning fossil fuels to produce energy to power their prosperity. A compass To be sure, the Paris Agreement is not an instant panacea for global warming. It will only come into effect if 55 countries representing 55% of the world's present-day emissions of greenhouse gases ratify it. And it will enter into force only in 2020. But it has perhaps provided a compass, a future direction, to render Mother Earth more - not less - habitable. And slow down the calamities that we see increasing in both frequency and space. What does the Paris Agreement require? Firstly, it requires average global temperature rise to be kept to well below 2øC above pre-industrial levels - with a future target of 1.5øC. Developed countries - historically responsible for the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere - have to do more and lead the way. They are also to provide finance and other means (technology and capacity-building) to assist developing countries to switch to renewable energy sources. Otherwise the economic growth of developing countries could be adversely affected in a major way, impairing their efforts to eradicate poverty and develop sustainably. Secondly, all countries must provide their nationally determined contributions for mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation, with developed countries providing more ambitious absolute economy-wide targets; developing countries can choose the sectors in which to reduce emissions. Thirdly, developed countries must also indicate the support they are going to provide. An amount of $100 billion per year until 2025 has been agreed to in an accompanying decision. After that it will be enhanced further as agreed. Fourthly, all countries are to provide information to ensure that they have followed through with their commitments - in mitigation and adaptation. Developed countries must also inform of the support they have provided to developing countries, which in turn must inform of the amount received. A global stocktake is also planned to assess the collective progress towards achieving the temperature target. This will be done every five years beginning from 2023. This will inform the efforts by countries to update and enhance their individual targets. Developing-country measures Developing countries must now embark on fulfilling their obligations to reduce carbon emissions by a plethora of ways. Basically they have to reduce reliance on fossil fuels for the production of energy and switch steadily to renewables such as solar and wind power. They will need to accelerate research and investment in technologies that reduce reliance on fossil fuels. They should also institute other measures such as reducing the use of cars (through wider use of public transport, for example) and altering consumption and lifestyle patterns - through regulatory as well as softer incentivised schemes. Consonant with the Paris Agreement, it is imperative that developed countries provide financial support, primarily through a key channel for climate finance - the Green Climate Fund - to achieve the 'conditional' mitigation and adaptation targets set out in the developing countries' Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), and to fund access to expensive Northern-owned technologies for the gradual switch to renewables. Past experience shows that the money may not be readily forthcoming. A 2010 Cancun decision requiring developed countries to provide $100 billion a year up to 2020 has yielded only a paltry $10 billion to date! There are wider concerns. The Paris Agreement does not place any serious, ambitious and binding restrictions on the developed countries to reduce emissions. This sanctions their continuing appropriation of the global commons and ignores their historical responsibility for creating the problem of global warming in the first place. The future also looks bleak for developing countries. Because their access to adequate carbon space has shrunk significantly, the energy costs for their development will rise. So unless the cumulative emissions limit - especially of developed countries - is addressed seriously, there is little prospect of limiting global warming to below the 2øC threshold, let alone the 1.5øC aim of the Paris Agreement. The price for this will be paid by the vulnerable populations across the planet, the bulk of which are in the developing world. Gurdial Singh Nijar is a professor at the Law Faculty, University of Malaya. He was the spokesperson at the climate negotiations for the Like-Minded Developing Countries grouping which includes China, India, Malaysia and 25 other countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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