New climate rules aim to keep nations committed to the Paris Agreement

There’s now a set of standards for all Paris Agreement-aligned countries to stick to as they work to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change.

The deal between the agreement’s nearly 200 participating countries came after an all-night negotiating session at the COP24 conference in Katowice, Poland. It establishes a “rulebook” aimed at guiding countries toward planning and implementing climate-focused policies and measuring the effects of emissions.

“In Katowice, countries made important progress toward realizing the promise of the Paris Agreement — in particular by adopting strong rules requiring countries to transparently report their greenhouse gas emissions and progress toward meeting their national commitments,” read a statement from Nathaniel Keohane, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“Those rules, known as the ‘transparency framework,’ are vital to the success of the Paris Agreement. To avoid dangerous warming, countries need to ratchet up their ambition dramatically, which will only happen if countries have clarity about what others are committing to, and confidence that they are meeting those commitments.”

The agreement also creates safeguards to ensure that more prosperous nations will be on the hook to lay out exactly how they’ll help poorer nations keep up. These include contributions to cash pools meant to help nations struggling to hit their goals, such as the Green Climate Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund. But there are also still concerns some countries won’t hold up their end of the bargain, or that it won’t be enough even if they do.

“It’s clear much greater financial assistance is needed to ensure developing countries can climate solutions and adapt to the increasingly extreme impacts from a warming world,” read a statement from Helen Mountford, of the World Resources Institute. “Next year is a key moment for countries to come forward with ambitious pledges for the Green Climate Fund’s first replenishment.”

There are also those who take a dim view on the talks as a whole, since they gave pro-fossil fuel countries — including the United States — a prominent seat at the table. Particularly in the wake of the recent United Nations report which laid out the dramatic changes that would be necessary to slow global temperature increases over the new 20 to 30 years.

“The end result is underwhelming, signalling that not even the last IPCC report” — the aforementioned UN report — “was enough of a wake up call for some of the biggest polluters on the planet,” a statement from 350.org’s May Boeve read. “Even more troubling, the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia have gone out of their way to block the official endorsement of the IPCC report, making it clear the low regard in which they hold both science and multilateralism.”

All participating countries are generally expected to work on upping their efforts to cut emissions ahead of 2020’s next round of talks. Although Donald Trump signaled his intent back in 2017 for the USA to bow out of Paris Agreement commitments, a formal withdrawal isn’t possible until 2020.