Almost all governments have outlined plans to fight global warming beyond 2020 in a positive sign for resolving a string of obstacles at a UN climate summit starting today, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius said on Saturday.
So far this year, 183 of 195 nations have issued long-term plans for tackling climate change, meant as building blocks for a Paris accord, with a flurry of more than a dozen in the past week including from South Sudan, Kuwait, Yemen and Cuba.
“This is radically new,” Fabius told a news conference of the almost universal involvement, including by countries such as Cuba, which was among a handful that blocked a global deal at the last, failed, summit in Copenhagen in 2009.
Photo: EPA
The plans, including a Chinese commitment made in June to peak its rising carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, cover about 95 percent of world emissions, the UN said.
Fabius said the number of submissions was encouraging before the summit, to be attended by about 140 world leaders including US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Chinese commitment.
However, she said the overall proposed targets for reduction were not enough to limit rising temperatures to a UN goal of 2°C to avert more floods, extinctions of animals and plants and rising sea levels.
“That means we need a follow up process and that, in my view, must be binding,” she said.
A train carrying Germany’s environment minister to the Paris talks was held up for two hours by protesters who chained themselves to the railway tracks at Frankfurt station on Saturday, a police spokesman said.
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said authorities had put 24 environmentalists under house arrest ahead of the climate talks, using emergency laws put in place following the Paris shootings.
Fabius said there were still many hurdles to a deal at the conference, ranging from climate finance to developing nations beyond an agreed goal of US$100 billion per year by 2020.
“You have positive elements and others that need to be resolved,” Fabius said after handing the keys of the sprawling Le Bourget conference center to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres.
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