The quick approval of the Paris Agreement on climate change could lead to a faster timetable for countries to implement their plans to reduce carbon emissions, an Obama administration official said Tuesday.
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing said a climate change meeting in Morocco next month will see a more aggressive implementation plan for the Paris Agreement.
“The session will endorse an accelerated timetable for the work called for in the Paris Agreement,” Pershing said at an event at the Atlantic Council. “We initially thought it would take a number of years for this to happen. It’s gone much more quickly, so we’re accelerating the timetable for this to happen.”
The Paris Agreement entered into effect earlier this month after enough countries followed through with their processes for agreeing to the first international climate change deal. More than 55 countries accounting for more than 55 percent of the world’s carbon emissions were required to endorse the deal for it to go into effect. Many scientists blame greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for driving man-made climate change.
The goal of the nonbinding agreement is to hold global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius, a mark that scientists believe may be overly ambitious. Each of the 196 countries that signed the nonbinding deal had to come up with their own plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The United States’ commitments to the plan include reducing carbon emissions between 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and paying significant amounts of money into a climate fund for poorer countries to stave off the effects of climate change.
Many critics have wondered why the United States has made such promises when other countries, such as India and China, may not live up to their end of the bargain.
Other criticisms include that the deal is not legally binding and has no formal punishment mechanism for countries that don’t abide by their emissions reductions plans. Critics also have ripped the agreement’s plan to send aid from rich countries to poorer countries to help them stave off the effects of climate change.
However, many environmentalists see the agreement as a vital first step in uniting the globe in addressing climate change. The countries that signed the agreement will meet every five years to review their progress and possibly make increasingly bigger strides toward cutting down on carbon emissions.
