What issues faced the World climate change summit 2015
PARIS BECAUSE
In the final meeting of the Paris
talks on climate change on Saturday night, the debating chamber was
full and the atmosphere tense. Ministers from 196 countries sat behind
their country nameplates, aides flocking them, with observers packed
into the overflowing hall.
World leaders hail Paris climate deal as ‘major leap for mankind’
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John Kerry, the US secretary of state, talked animatedly with his
officials, while China’s foreign minister Xie Zhenhua wore a troubled
look. They had been waiting in this hall for nearly two hours. The
French hosts had trooped in to take their seats on the stage, ready to
applaud on schedule at 5.30pm – but it was now after 7pm, and the
platform was deserted.
After two weeks of fraught negotiations, was something going badly wrong?
Then at 7.16pm, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, returned
abruptly to the stage, flanked by high-ranking UN officials. The
last-minute compromises had been resolved, he said. And suddenly they
were all on their feet. Fabius brought down the green-topped gavel, a
symbol of UN talks, and announced that a Paris agreement had been
signed. The delegates were clapping, cheering and whistling wildly,
embracing and weeping. Even the normally reserved economist Lord Stern
was whooping.
Outside the hall, a “Mexican wave” of standing ovations rippled
across the conference centre as news reached participants gathered
around screens outside for the translation into their own language. The
50,000 people who attended the summit had been waiting for this moment,
through marathon negotiating sessions and sleepless nights.
The contrast with the last global attempt to resolve climate change,
at Copenhagen in 2009, which collapsed into chaos and recriminations,
could not have been greater. In a city recently hit by terrorist attacks
that left 130 dead and scores more critically injured, collective will
had prevailed.
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