Accomplishments Of The Paris Agreement

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which set legally binding emission reduction targets (as well as penalties for non-compliance) only for industrialized countries, the Paris Agreement requires all countries – rich, poor, developed and developing – to take their share and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, the Paris Agreement provides for greater flexibility: commitments […]

Fecha: 2020-11-27

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which set legally binding emission reduction targets (as well as penalties for non-compliance) only for industrialized countries, the Paris Agreement requires all countries – rich, poor, developed and developing – to take their share and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, the Paris Agreement provides for greater flexibility: commitments that countries should make are not included, countries can voluntarily set their emissions targets and countries will not be penalized if they do not meet their proposed targets. But what the Paris agreement requires is to monitor, report and reassess, over time, the objectives of individual and collective countries, in order to bring the world closer to the broader objectives of the agreement. And the agreement stipulates that countries must announce their next round of targets every five years, contrary to the Kyoto Protocol, which was aimed at this target but which contained no specific requirements to achieve this goal. While the enhanced transparency framework is universal and the global inventory is carried out every five years, the framework must provide “integrated flexibility” to distinguish the capabilities of developed and developing countries. In this context, the Paris Agreement contains provisions to improve the capacity-building framework. [58] The agreement recognizes the different circumstances of some countries and notes, in particular, that the technical review of experts for each country takes into account the specific capacity of that country to report. [58] The agreement also develops a capacity-building initiative for transparency to help developing countries put in place the necessary institutions and procedures to comply with the transparency framework. [58] The president`s promise to renegotiate the international climate agreement has always been a smokescreen, the oil industry has a red phone at the Interior Department, and will Trump bring food trucks to Old Faithful? Recognizing that many developing countries and small island developing states that have contributed the least to climate change are most likely to suffer the consequences, the Paris Agreement contains a plan for developed countries – and others that are able to do so – to continue to provide financial resources to help developing countries reduce and increase their capacity to withstand climate change. The agreement builds on the financial commitments of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which aimed to increase public and private climate finance to developing countries to $100 billion per year by 2020. (To put it in perspective, in 2017 alone, global military spending amounted to about $1.7 trillion, more than a third of which came from the United States. The Copenhagen Pact also created the Green Climate Fund to mobilize transformation funding with targeted public dollars. The Paris agreement expected the world to set a higher annual target by 2025 to build on the $100 billion target by 2020 and create mechanisms to achieve this.

Taking part in an election campaign promise, Trump – a climate denier who has claimed that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by China, announced in June 2017 his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. But despite the rose garden president`s statement that “we`re going out,” it`s not that simple. The withdrawal procedure requires that the agreement be in effect for three years before a country can formally announce its intention to withdraw.