With a conference in Paris hailed as the largest ever gathering of world leaders, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ended in triumph Saturday with an agreement between 196 countries that aims to hold global temperature change to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels with intentions to go even further and arrest temperature change within 1.5 degrees Celsius.
While many consider those goals already impossible, the mood at the conference, in a city shaken by terrorists attacks that left 130 dead and scores injured two weeks before the conference began, was one of unity and cohesion. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the accomplishment, which was announced late Saturday on the last day of the conference, as a demonstration of international cooperation on an unprecedented level. “For the first time, every country in the world has pledged to curb emissions, strengthen resilience and join in a common cause to take a common climate action,” he said.
The conference could be summed up in a phrase that might have come from a Bob Dylan song back in the 1960s: It is better to have all the nations of the world united behind an impossible goal than to have them all disagree on a realistic one.
The agreement calls for mitigating harmful greenhouse gas emissions and for offering financial assistance to poorer countries that are having difficulty reaching their goals to cap or reduce emissions. Aid has also been pledged to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change, such as floods, droughts or incidents of extreme weather.
Moreover, the plans for stalling climate change are set on a course that becomes more strident in the future. Of the 196 participating countries, 188 of them have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions that spell out their approach to the issue. Every five years, these plans will be revised and future plans must be equally or more ambitious than the previous ones, according to the agreement.
The agreement was hailed as the culmination of 23 years of United Nations efforts to forge a collective starting point for dealing with a phenomenon that transcends national borders. “There are parts of it [the agreement] that frustrate [me],” said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, as quoted in the Guardian. “But it is progress. The deal alone won't dig us out of the hole that we're in, but it makes the sides less steep,” he said.