Paris, Dec 14: One little word stood in the way of a historic climate accord in Paris for several hours, bringing years of preparations and weeks of negotiations between nearly 200 countries to a screeching halt. A late-night switch of “shall” with “should” in a paragraph of the text paved the way for the deal that offers hope to billions of people across the world against the mounting threat from global warming.
The shall-to-should change made economy-wise emission reduction targets non-obligatory for rich nations, putting them almost at par with the developing world on achieving a zero-emission goal by the turn of the century.
The developments also demonstrated the might of the United States diplomatic machinery that got the word changed, identified as an error by the UN secretariat, to take home a deal exactly the way President Barack Obama had envisaged. The deal commits countries to hold the global average temperature to “well below 2°C” above pre-industrial levels and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
The first Paris Outcome paper had decisions of the Conference of Parties as an annexure of the Paris agreement, making the COP decisions binding.
