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China and the United States have pledged to increase cooperation on climate action at U.N. talks in Glasgow, China’s climate envoy said Wednesday.
As the talks approached a Friday deadline, Xie Zhenhua told reporters that the two biggest carbon polluters would outline their efforts in a joint statement based on the guidelines of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
The agreement calls for “concrete and pragmatic’’ regulations in decarbonization, reducing methane emissions and fighting deforestation, Xie said.
“Both sides recognize that there is a gap between the current effort and the Paris agreement,” he said. “So we will jointly strengthen climate action and cooperation with respect to our respective national situations.”
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U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was expected to speak to reporters later Wednesday.
The announcement came as governments from around the world were negotiating in Glasgow about how to build on the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect vulnerable countries from the impacts of global warming.
A draft deal released Wednesday calls for pulling the plug on coal power, the single biggest source of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The early version of the final document also expresses “alarm and concern” about how much Earth has already warmed and urges countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by about half by 2030. Pledges so far from governments don’t add up to that frequently stated goal.
Some nations, especially island states whose very existence is threatened by climate change, warned that the draft didn’t go far enough in requiring action to limit increases in global temperatures or in helping poorer countries to pay for adapting to the warming and for losses from it.
“‘Urging,’ ‘calling,’ ‘encouraging,’ and ‘inviting’ is not the decisive language that this moment calls for,” Aubrey Webson, Antigua and Barbuda’s U.N. ambassador, said in a statement.
With time running out in…
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Source : time
