Brussels, 14/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - Exhausted but “relieved” after two weeks of intense negotiations, Climate Action and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said on Monday 14 December that the Paris multilateral agreement reached two days previously at the UN climate conference COP 21, the first universal binding agreement (see EUROPE 11452), was “just a step, but a good one”.
“The hard work has only begun. What has been promised has to be delivered”, the commissioner told the press in Brussels, pointing out that “many decisions” will need to be taken between now and the COP 22 conference in Marrakesh in November 2016. Praising the approach taken by the French presidency of COP 21, which managed to build bridges between differing interests, he said that these international talks, involving close to 200 countries, could only result in a compromise agreement, no one could hope to get all they were looking for. “If I had been told last Tuesday that such an agreement was possible, I would have said 'You're mad!'”, he stated, underlining that the first week of talks, opened with the statements of dozens of heads of state and/or government, had brought “no progress”.
The US$100 billion minimum level of financing that the developed nations will have to provide to the countries of the South by 2020 to help them minimise their environmental footprint and face up to the impact of climate change, features in the decision annexed to the agreement and not in the agreement itself. This means that the United States will be able to avoid having to seek ratification by the Congress dominated, as it is, by climate-sceptical Republicans. “It's true we have a major problem with the United States” but “flexibility” was needed not to compel a vote in Congress, Canete confirmed, making clear that it would be impossible not to have a country that produces 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions on board.
The commissioner pointed out that numerous other chapters of the agreement were well and truly binding on all parties. He said that “long-term objectives are binding”, with a limit on the average temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and the pursuit of efforts to limit the rise to 1.5 degrees. Similarly, he said, “the stock-taking exercise is binding”, evaluating efforts made to tackle global warming, and will begin in 2013 and will then carried out every five years thereafter. He said he was certain that reality would kick in: if China, Brazil and South Africa take part, the United States will not be able to sit on the sidelines of this regular evaluation exercise.
Canete also set out in detail how the “High ambition coalition”, in which the European Union played a leading role, came to be set up. With, in addition to the EU, only a dozen countries that might be described as “progressive” at its first meeting in May, the coalition managed to persuade and bring on board a great many developed and developing countries, until the United States, then Brazil, joined the ranks of the coalition. According to the commissioner: “And then Brazil happened. That was a game changer”. “After our (coordination) meeting on Friday, we walked all together to the plenary. At that point, I knew that we would get a good deal in Paris. That was the confirmation”, he said. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)