The Paris Climate Agreement Is Now Official
Source: Huffington Post
The Paris Climate Agreement Is Now Official
The historic deal to address climate change will enter into force in 30 days.
10/05/2016 06:22 pm ET
Emily Tate
Politics Intern, The Huffington Pos
World leaders agreed in December to adopt plans to address planet-warming emissions, an attempt to slow the catastrophic effects of climate change. But signatories still needed to go back to their countries and ratify the deal — a necessary step that was achieved on Wednesday.
The agreement, which seeks to limit global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), couldn’t take effect until at least 55 countries responsible for more than 55 percent of global greenhouse emissions formally adopted it. The European Union’s ratification on Tuesday bumped up participation to the necessary threshold. By Wednesday, 73 countries had ratified the agreement, accounting for nearly 57 percent of emissions.
The climate deal will enter into force in 30 days — less than a year after it was first reached. This is a major improvement over its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect eight years after it was adopted. That agreement didn’t live up to its promise, however, as the United States never ratified it and it didn’t include major emerging emitters like China and India.
More than 190 countries, representing 96 percent of global emissions, attended last year’s climate conference in Paris, part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies and greenhouse gas emitters, formally joined the agreement Sept. 3, encouraging other countries to do the same. India joined later in the month.
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