Without cash, Paris Agreement remains a pipe dream

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French President Emmanuel Macron gathered world leaders Tuesday to talk about climate finance at One Planet Summit, two years to the day since 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement to stave off worst-case-scenario global warming.

Without trillions of dollars of investment in clean energy, the pact's goal to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels will remain a pipe dream, observers and participants warned.

"We hope that this conference will be action first thing, particularly on providing financial support for the developing countries and small island developing countries and vulnerable countries," former UN chief Ban Ki-moon said ahead of the summit.

UN Climate Chief Patricia Espinosa warned political action "will not be enough if we do not update and reset the global finance architecture and make all development low-emission, resilient, and sustainable."

Brigitte Macron (R), wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, welcome world leaders for lunch at the Elysee Palace as part of the One Planet Summit in Paris, France, December 12, 2017. / Reuters Photo

"We see some movement... but climate consideration must now be part of all private sector decisions," she added.

After the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 to cheers and champagne, helped over the finish line by then US president Barack Obama, his successor Donald Trump has cast a long shadow over the process, withdrawing political support and finance.

Trump, who has called climate change a "hoax", announced in June the United States would pull out of the Paris pact, which had taken nearly 200 nations more than two decades to negotiate.

Macron said Monday he hoped Trump would "change his mind", and awarded grants to 18 climate scientists, 13 of them from American universities, to pursue their research in France to "Make Our Planet Great Again" – a play on the American president's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again."

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May for lunch at the Elysee Palace as part of the One Planet Summit in Paris, France, December 12, 2017. / ‍Reuters Photo

Money has long been a sore point in the UN climate process, with developing nations insisting on financial assistance to help them make the costly move to less-polluting energy sources, and to shore up defenses against climate change-induced superstorms, mega-droughts and land-gobbling sea level rise.

Trump has asked Congress to slash the climate research budgets of federal agencies – threatening a loss of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

The Trump administration would also not fulfill US climate finance commitments, including an outstanding two billion US dollars out of three billion US dollars it had pledged towards the Green Climate Fund.

In the absence of former climate champion Obama, American businesses, regions and local government leaders have reiterated their commitment to de-carbonization, and are represented in Paris by the likes of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, ex-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

"It doesn't matter that Donald Trump backed out of the Paris Agreement, because the private sector didn't drop out, the public sector didn't drop out, universities didn't drop out, no one dropped out," Schwarzenegger, now the face of the R20 network of sub-national climate actors, said in Paris Monday. "Don't worry about any of that, we are the subnational level, we're going to pick up the slack."

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Source(s): AFP ,Reuters