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Cabinet approves signing the Paris Agreement

By
AC Team 1
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The Union Cabinet headed by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved for signing the Paris Agreement adopted at the 21st Conference of Parties held in Paris in last December.

  • Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar will sign the agreement from India side on 22 April 2016 at the high level signature ceremony convened by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Global Climate Agreement:

  • The Climate Change Conference COP-21 was held in Paris, where 195 countries accepted the first-ever universal legally binding global climate deal.
  • The agreement intends to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to Paris Agreementswell below 2 degree Celsius ambient temperature. The agreement is due to come into force in 2020.

The salient features :

Right to Development:

  • The Agreement acknowledges the development essentials of developing countries. The Agreement recognizes the developing countries’ right to development and their efforts to harmonize development with environment.

Sustainable Lifestyle:

  • It recognizes the importance of sustainable lifestyles and sustainable patterns of consumption with developed countries taking the lead, and notes the importance of ‘climate justice’ in its preamble.
  • It also seeks to enhance the ‘implementation of the Convention’ whilst reflecting the principles of equity and common but distinguished responsibilities and individual capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances.

MitigationAdaption:

  • The Agreement aims to ensure that it is not mitigation-centric and includes other important elements such as adaptation, loss and damage, finance, technology, capacity building and transparency of action and support.

Financial Scale up from Developed Countries

  • Pre-2020 actions are in the provisions of the agreement .
  • The developed country parties are pressed to scale up their level of financial backing to achieve the goal of jointly providing US $ 100 billion by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation by significantly increasing adaptation finance from current levels.