Experts at the UN's annual climate change conference in
Katowice, Poland, have urged nations to adhere to the path of the Paris
agreement, which sets a global target of keeping the average temperature rise
no higher than 2°C above preindustrial levels.
"This year is likely to be one of the four hottest
years on record," Patricia Espinosa, the UN's climate chief, said in a
news release from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
which opened Sunday.
"Greenhouses gas concentrations in the atmosphere
are at record levels and emissions continue to rise. Climate change impacts
have never been worse," she said. "This reality is telling us that we
need to do much more — COP24 needs to make that happen."
The 24th Conference of the Parties to UNFCCC, or COP24,
is tasked with finalizing detailed implementation guidelines for the landmark
Paris treaty signed in 2015.
The conference comes amid a slew of reports warning of
increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions and their threat to
health and other serious impacts, including a report on the effects of global
warming of 1.5°C above
preindustrial levels by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Espinosa stressed that all of these findings confirm the
need to maintain the strongest commitment to the Paris agreement's aims of
limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts toward 1.5°C.
"All our focus should be on reaching this aim and on
building up ambition toward it," she said, adding the increasing public
awareness and demand for solutions because of the clear evidence that the
climate is changing has given countries strong backing for rapid action.
Michal Kurtyka, the COP24 president, was quoted in the
release as saying, "The 2015 Paris agreement entered into force faster
than any other agreement of its kind. I now call on all countries to come
together, to build upon this success and to make the agreement fully
functional.
"We are ready to work with all nations to ensure
that we leave Katowice with a full set of implementation guidelines and with
the knowledge that we have served the world and its people," he added.
To map out the detailed implementation guidelines for the
Paris agreement as scheduled should be the core task of COP24.
Adhering to the path of the agreement, the implementation
guidelines should embody the principles of equity, common but differentiated
responsibilities, respective capabilities and in the light of different
national circumstances, according to China's Policy and Actions for Addressing
Climate Change (2018), which was published late last month.
The document calls on parties to promote the
implementation of pre-2020 promises and actions to lay a mutual-trust
foundation for post-2020 implementation of the Paris agreement.
Developed countries should offer more detailed
information on the delivery of $100 billion of support for developing countries
every year before 2020 and meet the reasonable financial demand from developing
countries over climate change issues, it added.
At the 2009 Copenhagen conference, COP15, developed
countries pledged $30 billion to a so-called Fast Start fund from 2010 to 2012
and a scale-up of aid to $100 billion a year by 2020.