Platypus Header

Platypus Innovation Blog

14 December 2015

The COP21 Paris Agreement - The Full Text

Here is the full text of the final version of the Paris COP21 agreement on Climate Change. Hurrah!

TL:DR; It's a good deal, better than expected. But it has no teeth!

Good points are the goal of peaking and reduce as fast as possible, a sensible target, $100bn in annual aid from 2020, and trying to base policy on science. Weak points are that countries set their own targets, and there are no penalties if they don't meet them. So this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the morass and the start of a solution.

The best thing is the progress. The test is what happens next.

2 degrees does not sound much. Why the worry? To put 2 degrees in perspective, a 4 degree rise would be “incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”, according to climate expert Professor Andersen, University of Manchester.

Good-Loop Unit