French President Emmanuel Macron has said he believes President Donald Trump will bring the US back into the Paris deal on combating climate change, reports agencies. But, Macron says he will not agree to the president's demand that America's terms should be negotiated. Macron condemned the manner in which the US had signed an international deal, then withdrawn from it. "The US did sign the Paris Agreement. It's extremely aggressive to decide on its own just to leave, and no way to push the others to renegotiate because one decided to leave the floor. I'm sorry to say that. It doesn't fly."
Macron gathered world leaders yesterday to talk about climate finance, 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 (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) 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 has said. 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.”
“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. The US is the only country to reject the agreement.
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.”
Meanwhile, the heads of several of the world’s space agencies have proposed the creation of a climate observatory to pool acquired data and share it with scientists around the globe, according to a declaration adopted Monday in Paris.
On the eve of the One Planet Summit organised in the French capital, the space agencies’ chiefs met to discuss climate monitoring from space, including such areas as greenhouse gases, water resource management and the use of satellites during natural disasters.
“Satellites are vital tools for studying and gaining new insights into climate change in order to mitigate its effects and help societies devise coping strategies,” France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which hosted the talks, said in a statement.
Former UN chiefs Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon have lashed out at the state of global leadership in the age of Donald Trump, warning a nuclear war could be triggered by accident. “Honestly speaking, we are in a mess,” Annan told AFP in an interview ahead of yesterday’s climate talks in Paris. “In the past when we went through this sort of crisis, you had leaders who had the courage and the vision to want to take action, to understand that they needed to work with others,” he said. At a time of growing US isolationism—Trump has announced plans to leave the Paris climate deal agreed two years ago on this day—Annan urged leaders to cooperate better on fighting terrorism, migration and global warming.