As he had promised during
the campaign President Joe Biden
brought the United States back into
the Paris Climate Agreement.
But what does it actually mean?
What should we be looking for in
the future if we want to see the US
be part of this international
effort to deal with climate
change well joining us right now is
an expert who's going to spell it
all out for us is the director of
strategy and policy for
the cop high level champions for
climate action Jen Austin
welcome the damage report
>> Thank you John, glad to be here
>> Were very glad to have you here.
So I'm assuming you were not
particularly surprised by
the re-entry it had been
telegraphed pretty much as
much as anything else politically
over the past year or so.
>> Yeah, absolutely is a very Clear
commitment by the Biden campaign
and so, I think we knew by day one
that that was going to be
a priority for day one.
And they did in fact,
follow through on their first day
with an executive order including
a commitment to Rejoining
the Paris Agreement.
>> Awesome, and for those who might
not know all the ins and outs,
especially with the US is checkered
history of the past few years with
the agreement.
In sort of broad terms,
what is the agreement about?
What does it intended
to accomplish?
>> Sure, so the Paris Agreement is
a global agreement for,
through which the countries of
the world are getting together
to try to address climate change
their are biggest shared
pressing challenge and concern and
it was negotiated over many years,
up until and came together in 2015,
so the Paris agreement was agreed
in that year And importantly they
had learned from many years of
negotiations on climate.
And what the Paris Agreement did
is it made sure that every country
had a specific emissions
reduction commitment.
And in previous times in previous
attempts at climate agreements,
either not all the countries were
included, or they tried too much to
negotiate the different Exactly
what those targets needed to be.
And so countries ultimately
couldn't sign up to it.
And what the Paris Agreement did
was it sort of merged both of those
that made sure that every country
in the world including some of
the fast developing countries
were involved whereas when we
started these negotiations
now 26 years ago, because we're
coming up on the 26th conference,
there was very different balance
in size of economies and
who was responsible for emissions.
And so some of the developing
countries like India and
China were not included in needing
to have their own emissions
reduction targets.
By the time we got to 2015,
obviously, given the size of those
economies and the size of their
emissions, it was important that
they had Commitments of some sort.
Equally though we live in a world
in which countries are sovereign
nations, they make their own rules.
Most laws are enforceable within
country boundaries and less, so
across country boundaries.
And so the agreement made it so
that every country was committed to
putting forward a commitment, and
there's a process for transparency,
and that those commitments would be
transparent and transparently
reported on and then we'd allow
the public Political process to
play out through which countries
make progress towards those
commitments can put pressure and
encouragement on each other to
achieve what they said they would
achieve and then go further.
And now, five years later,
we're set up for what were called
the first review and ratchet and so
the deal itself included a plan for
targets that cover five years and
then every five years to together
revisit those targets recognizing
that as big a breakthrough as it
was for all the countries to agree
to the Paris agreement when they
did the goals they put on the table
didn't add up to where we needed to
be so we knew already that we would
need to revisit that and that's
really what's on the table for
this year.
>> So basically you're saying that
even if during this review it's
shown, that they've accomplished
what they had individually said
they would after five years.
That by itself isn't necessarily,
an amazing sign in terms of being
able to meet the overall goals
over a longer period of time.
>> Right, it's very good progress,
but it's not enough, and so
the Paris agreement
included the countries of the world
together saying that they wanted to
limit warming to no more than 2
degrees with best efforts to
actually limit that to 1.5 degrees.
That was their shared goal then
they had to put an individual
commitment on the table.
Even on day one, if you added
up those individual commitments,
they didn't add to two degrees
never mind 1.5.
Since then the science
has only gotten more clear we know
the urgency has only gotten more.
The difference between that 1.5 and
two degrees in terms of impacts
in the world is very, very stark.
And so if we were on track to
achieve even those original
commitments, that was a first
very important step,
but only a first step.
The reality is, in some cases,
we're not on track to achieve those
commitments.
And now that next step has to be
taken both to figure out what needs
to be done to make sure those goals
are achieved and importantly,
what that next level of ambition
needs to be to make sure we get
to our shared ultimate goal
of limiting warming to 1.5.
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