Comment: Maintain Paris Momentum

Our world has celebrated the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. After years of fraught and often fruitless negotiations, all countries agreed to limit global warming by cutting greenhouse gases.

BUILD FAST

With the impacts of climate change mounting – from the human cost of floods, droughts and fires around the world to the disruption of UK wildlife by ever-earlier spring times – it’s time to build fast on ‘Paris’. Britain has an important role.

The already eight-month-old Paris Agreement won’t come into effect until ratified by 55 countries – together accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Only 19 of 178 signatories have done so.

Apart from Norway, these are almost all small island states that have contributed virtually nothing to the ‘stock’ of gases. But they face an existential threat from rising sea levels caused by the warming oceans and polar ice melt.

The world needs big emitters like US, China and EU to ratify before we lose the Paris momentum. Britain led the coal-powered industrial revolution. About two centuries later, in 2008, we were the first to bring in a Climate Change Act.

CLARIFY INTENTIONS

It would be a positive sign if post-Brexit Britain became the first major European power to ratify Paris. It would set an example. There’s a particular urgency for the US to do so before the November presidential elections, lest climate-denying republican candidate Donald Trump triumphs.

It would clarify our new government’s intentions. One of Prime Minister Teresa May’s first acts was to dissolve the Department for Energy and Climate Change and tuck climate into a combined business and energy department. Positive or negative? Views differ.

The PM could allay fears that she is abandoning climate leadership by ensuring Britain leads the industrialised world in ratifying Paris. She should do so swiftly.