Climate Week opens today in New York on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, and will bring together policy makers, economists and activists from all over the world. The first in the post-COP21 era, it faces a dual challenge: ensuring the Paris Agreement enters into force as soon as possible and accelerating action to achieve the targets set by this agreement.
The Paris Agreement is due to enter into force in 2020, provided that 55 states that account for at least 55% of global emissions have ratified it, in other words integrated it into their national legal systems. The strong momentum generated in Paris—demonstrated again recently when China, the United States and Brazil ratified the agreement—means it is now possible to envisage an entry into force by the end of 2016! Following the commitments and calls of the G20 members in China, this week Ban Ki-moon will bring together the heads of state and government to tackle this issue. All eyes are on the European Union (which could ratify the agreement in the name of the EU, before the totality of each member state individually) and India.
The second challenge for Climate Week is accelerating action to achieve the targets set by the Paris Agreement, in other words keeping the increase in temperatures to below +2°C, pursuing efforts to limit the increase to +1.5°C, ensuring global emissions peak as soon as possible, and undertaking rapid reductions thereafter.
This requires strong action from all actors, whether public or private. In particular, Climate Week will be the opportunity to gauge the reaction of economic and financial actors. Many commitments were made during COP21 and numerous initiatives were launched. These commitments must now be put to effect and the momentum further accelerated so that they become the new normal.
Ensuring convergence between short-term action and the Paris Agreement objectives implies promoting action with real potential for change and aligning public and private actors’ efforts to that end. The establishment of long-term low emissions development strategies (LEDS), encouraged by the Paris Agreement, should be approached from this angle. IDDRI continues to be strongly committed to this process and has recently brought together 50 researchers from the Deep Decarbonization Pathways international network to launch phase two of the project.
IDDRI is also working to identify the specific conditions and procedures of the transition, which requires the establishment of a coherent set of accompanying policies. In this perspective, IDDRI launches the Coal Transitions project in collaboration with Climate Strategies. The goal of this two-year project is to study the conditions for coal phase-out for six highly dependent countries—China, India, Australia, South Africa, Poland and Germany—taking into account their socioeconomic specificities.
