The common rules to govern the efforts by nations to fight global warming, adopted at a key United Nations conference on climate change in Poland over the weekend, only set the stage for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide. Whether the accord's goal of taming the man-made rises in temperatures and averting the catastrophic consequences of climate change can be achieved will depend on if participating countries, including Japan, can substantially upgrade and carry out their plans to cut emissions.
That the participants in the 24th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change could agree on a set of universal and transparent rules to verify how the countries are cutting emissions according to their commitments — despite reported divisions between rich industrialized nations and developing countries — in time for the year-end deadline so they can put the Paris accord in force in 2020 as planned is a sign of progress. But that was the minimum that was needed to be achieved at the conference to sustain the credibility of the agreement and move global efforts to combat climate change forward.
It has been made clear that countries need to do much more than they have so far pledged to achieve the agreement's goal of keeping rises in global temperatures within 2 degrees — and preferably closer to 1.5 degrees — from pre-industrial levels. Earlier this month an international research team reported that global carbon dioxide emissions, after being nearly flat for three years through 2016, likely picked up again in 2017 and this year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in October that temperature rises could hit 1.5 degrees as early as in 2030, raising sea levels and making damage from extreme weather more severe. These warnings — plus the spate of extreme weather that wreaked havoc in many countries this year — may have prompted the COP24 participants to reach an agreement by extending the conference two days.