Historic COP21 deal within reach says French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius said on Tuesday that an ambitious global climate deal to limit carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic global warming is within reach
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Tuesday that an ambitious global climate deal to limit carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic global warming is within reach.
Fabius was speaking after a meeting of ministers ahead of the COP21 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December.
The French Foreign Minister, who is central to preparations for the climate negotiations, said progress had been made on a number of crucial areas during a two-day meeting in Paris of ministers from about 60 countries.
Fabius said: “An ambitious compromise is in sight and a series of concrete proposals have been made in that light.”
Governments have made progress towards a target of limiting global warming by submitting Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the UN as part of the COP21 negotiations.
According to a French working document, more than 30 core issues remain unresolved before the meeting which runs from 30 November to 11 December.
Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the ministers maintained that it was entirely possible to reach an agreement despite the challenges.
Figueres said: “We are coming to the last possibilities to turn the curve on emissions that continue to increase even today. We have to get them to the point where they turn the corner and begin to decrease.”
Swedish officials said the last round of the negotiations is likely to go down to the final moments and will address financing for developing countries to improve adaptation and mitigation measures to enhance resiliency to the impacts of climate change.
Sweden has committed about $580 million over four years to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, the main channels for donor countries to mobilise more than $100 billion a year in aid for developing nations by 2020.
An updated draft text for the proposed agreement was cut down by about half to cover 55 pages, but it still has 1,490 brackets marking points of disagreement and Sweden’s Environment Minister Asa Romson said: “A lot of ministers are not happy that the text is so full of brackets so close to the meeting… Technically, we are more advanced than in Copenhagen.”
