Climate change: almost 200 countries, including the US, reach an agreement on how the Paris Agreement will be applied

[Jose.]

Climate change: almost 200 countries, including the US, reach an agreement on how the Paris Agreement will be applied

It is the fine print of the great agreement to combat global warming.

Diplomats from almost 200 countries gathered in Katowice (Poland) closed a negotiation this Saturday on a detailed set of rules for the implementation of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

The pact, closed after a long night of dialogues, will require each participating country to follow the same standard to measure greenhouse gas emissions and follow up on its climate-related policies.

The map that shows the countries of Latin America and the world that consume more natural resources (and the impact it has on the planet)
Its establishment seeks to ensure compliance with the objective set in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to limit the increase in global temperatures to less than 2 ℃.

"Putting the work program of the Paris Agreement to work is a great responsibility, it has been a long way, we did our best not to leave anyone behind," said summit chairman Michal Kurtyka.

The agreed text includes an appeal to the states to strengthen their plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the next round of negotiations, scheduled for 2020.

It also asks developed countries to indicate what kind of aid they intend to offer to the poorest countries so that they are better prepared to cope with natural disasters and to have greater sources of clean energy.

Some of those attending the meeting expressed their frustration at considering that what was agreed upon is little, if one considers that greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and that there are millions of people in the world exposed to the risks related to growing climate crisis.

However, others were more optimistic in pointing out that they are laying a foundation on which they can continue to build.

"Given the general geopolitical context, this is a pretty solid result, it gives us what we need to get the Paris Agreement off the ground," Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told The New York Times. .

The return of the United States?
Among the 196 states that participated in the negotiations, one of the most active was the United States, which attended the meeting despite the fact that in 2016 President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

US participation was possible because the country can not formally leave that pact until the end of 2020.

In any case, the participation of the United States seems to have gone far beyond what is expected of a country that has no interest in the agreement.

According to The New York Times, the US delegation was constructively working with China behind the scenes on the rules of transparency, an issue that had kept them at bay, while while Beijing wanted different rules for developing countries, Washington wanted all the countries to States had to comply with the same rules.

And that was agreed upon.

"The key element was having a good transparency system because it allows us to build trust between countries and because we can measure what is being done and is sufficiently precise," Laurence Tubiana, one of the Paris Agreement builders, told the BBC.

Tubiana said that countries such as Russia, which have refused to ratify the Paris Agreement with the argument that they were not certain about the rules for its application, can no longer use that justification.

"That makes me happy, nobody can say that it is not clear, that they do not know what to do or that it is not true," he added.

This increase in transparency also responds to a key demand from the United States, which wanted the same rules of the game for all countries.

This - and the fact that the envoys of Washington have validated the new pact - created expectations among some activists about the possibility that the White House reverses its decision or, ultimately, that a future president decides to return to the Paris Agreement. .

It would not be an arbitrary decision, considering that it is the second country that emits the most greenhouse gases in the world.