Paris Climate Pact Retrospect And Prospects

There is now a sense of a global urgency emerging towards keeping the promise of the Paris Agreement and securing our future on this planet. Net-zero emissions is becoming the new normal on the horizon. Several major economies have committed to climate neutrality or net zero emissions in the coming decades. Arvind Kumar discusses such related issues in this article.

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December 12, 2020 marked the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate accord, the ambitious international agreement to address climate change that more than 196 countries signed on to in 2015. The legally binding international treaty went into effect on November 12, 2016. To that end, the participating nations agreed to keep the increase in the average global temperature to 2ËšC while striving to limit it to 1.5ËšC by the year 2100. Besides pledging to temper the rise in temperature, they agreed to restructure the global economy, phase out fossil fuels over the coming decades, switch to renewable sources of energy, embrace clean technology, and most importantly, to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to achieve a climate-neutral world by 2050.

Some of the prime manifestations of climate change are droughts and swarms of invading locusts across Africa and Asia, massive fires in Australia, floods, infrastructure collapsing in Siberia as permafrost melts, intense hurricanes in America, and typhoons in Asia. Loss of ice is also changing the Arctic terrain making it greener but at the expense of releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane trapped in the frozen soil, which in turn is making global warming even worse.

Human activities, especially deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, and open burning, are undoubtedly contributing to the increase of earth’s temperature. Deforestation is a perpetual elimination of green areas and replacing them with huge commercial farms, ranches, and human settlements.