The Paris Agreement, drawn up for two weeks in Paris at the 21st United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP21) on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and adopted on 12 December 2015 marked a historic turning point in the fight against global climate change, as world leaders representing 195 nations agreed on an agreement containing commitments from all countries to combat climate change and adapt to its impact. The Paris Agreement contains a series of binding measures to monitor, verify and publicly report progress towards a country`s emissions reduction targets. Improving transparency rules applies a common framework to all countries, providing housing and support to nations that are not currently able to strengthen their systems over time. A preliminary inventory-impact study was published in Nature Communications in April 2020. Based on a public policy database and a multi-model scenario analysis, the authors showed that the implementation of current strategies by 2030 leaves an average emission gap of 22.4 to 28.2 GtCO2eq, with optimal means to achieve targets well below 2 degrees Celsius and 1.5 degrees Celsius. If national contributions were fully implemented, this gap would be reduced by one-third. The countries assessed did not achieve their promised contributions with implemented measures (implementation deficit) or experienced a gap in ambition with optimal paths to well below 2oC. The study showed that all countries should accelerate the implementation of renewable technology strategies, while improving efficiency in emerging and fossil fuel-dependent countries is particularly important. [31] By quantifying the damage caused by carbon pollution to society, Trump sees America as an island apart – and we all know what climate change is doing to the islands. While the Paris Agreement ultimately aims to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, many studies evaluating the voluntary commitments of some countries in Paris show that the cumulative effect of these emission reductions will not be significant enough to keep temperatures below that ceiling. Indeed, the targets set by the target countries should limit the future increase in temperature between 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius. At the same time, recent assessments of countries` developments in the framework of their climate targets in Paris indicate that some countries are already not meeting their commitments.
While the enhanced transparency framework is universal and the global inventory is carried out every five years, the framework must provide “integrated flexibility” to distinguish the capabilities of developed and developing countries. In this context, the Paris Agreement contains provisions to improve the capacity-building framework. [58] The agreement recognizes the different circumstances of some countries and notes, in particular, that the technical review of experts for each country takes into account the specific capacity of that country to report. [58] The agreement also develops a capacity-building initiative for transparency to help developing countries put in place the necessary institutions and procedures to comply with the transparency framework. [58] This is part of the Paris Agreement`s efforts to increase emissions reduction ambitions.
