Breakthrough as US and China agree to ratify Paris climate deal

The United States and China, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have announced they will formally ratify the Paris climate change agreement in a move campaigners immediately hailed as a significant advance in the battle against global warming.

Speaking on Saturday, on the eve of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, US president, Barack Obama, confirmed the long-awaited move, the result of weeks of intense negotiations by Chinese and American officials.

“Just as I believe the Paris agreement will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet, I believe that history will judge today’s efforts as pivotal,” said Obama, who was speaking in the presence of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

“Where there is a will and there is a vision and where countries like China and the United States are prepared to show leadership and to lead by example, it is possible for us to create a world that is more secure, more prosperous and more free than the one that was left for us,” added Obama, for whom the commitment is part of a final push to secure a green legacy for his presidency.

Earlier China had announced it would formally ratify the Paris accord with President Xi vowing to “unwaveringly pursue sustainable development”.

“Our response to climate change bears on the future of our people and the well-being of mankind,” Xi said, according to the Associated Press.

Obama said the joint announcement showed how the world’s two largest economies were capable of coming together to fight climate change.

“Despite our differences on other issues we hope that our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire greater ambition and greater action around the world,” he said.

“We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is,” Obama told an audience at Hangzhou’s West Lake state guesthouse. “And when it comes to combating climate change that is what we are doing … we are leading by example.”

If the Paris agreement comes into force this year as hoped, it means the nearly 200 governments party to it will become obliged to meet emissions-cutting pledges made before the deal last December. For example, the EU has a “national determined contribution” of cutting emissions by 40% by 2030 on 1990 levels, and the US by up to 28% by 2025 compared with 2005.

The deal coming into force would also commit the countries to aspire to keep temperatures below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – a tall ask and one that will require those country pledges to be ramped up – and for rich countries to continue giving climate aid to poorer countries beyond 2020.

David Waskow, the international climate director of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, described the US-China announcement as a sign the world’s two largest economies had moved from “making commitments to delivering action”.

“When the two largest emitters lock arms to solve climate change, that is when you know we are on the right track,” Waskow said. “Never before have these two countries worked so closely together to address a global challenge. There’s no question that this historic partnership on climate change will be one of the defining legacies of Obama’s presidency.”

Ranping Song, the group’s China expert, called the announcement “a tremendous milestone” in the fight against climate change. “[This is] the two big countries coming together to acknowledge the challenges and then working together to tackle them,” Song said. “It’s good news.”

“The world finally has a global climate agreement with both the US and China as formal parties,” said Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International. “This signals a new era in global efforts to address climate change.”

In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress has questioned Obama’s legal right to ratify the accord by decree, noting that the constitution grants the Senate a role of “advice and consent” in making treaties.

But the chamber does not ratify treaties, and the US also has increasingly relied on “executive agreements” since the second world war. Those agreements are not submitted to the Senate but are also considered binding in international law.

The Paris agreement, sealed last December after two weeks of frantic negotiations, must be ratified by 55 countries, representing 55% of global emissions, in order to come into force.

The news that the world’s top two emitters – who are together responsible for about 38% of emissions – would formally ratify the deal is therefore a major step towards achieving that.

Before Saturday, only 24 countries – responsible for about 1% of global emissions – had ratified the agreement, while 180 had signed it.

Shortly before Obama landed in Hangzhou, China became the 25th country to ratify the agreement. It said the move would “safeguard environmental security” and was “conducive to China’s development interests”.

Song said the move increased the likelihood that the Paris deal would be implemented by the end of this year, possibly even before November’s UN climate summit in Marrakesh. “This would not be happening without the US and China ratifying the agreement,” he said.

Climate campaigners now expected a ratification “surge” in September, with other major emitters such as Brazil, the world’s seventh largest emitter, following suit, Song added.

Li Shuo, Greenpeace’s China climate policy adviser, said that if the international community did succeed in bringing the Paris deal into effect by the end of 2016 it would have been achieved “at lightening speed” compared with most international treaties.

Under Obama and Xi, US-China relations have been blighted by friction over issues such as the South China Sea, cyber espionage and, more recently, a planned missile defense system in South Korea.

But Sam Geall, the executive editor of China Dialogue, a bilingual website dedicated to environmental issues, said the announcement underscored how Beijing and Washington had managed to find common ground on climate change.

He said a breakthrough towards a UN deal on climate change had been on the cards since November 2014 when Obama and Xi jointly announced a secretly negotiated agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Geall said: “Certainly in terms of US-China relations, it is the one area where they have created a proper, active, cooperative relationship … [There are] a lot of flights back and forward, a lot of cooperative projects on coal, on renewables, on energy-efficient buildings, on innovation. There is a lot of substance beneath the announcements that come out.

Geall added: “I do think it is part of Obama’s legacy and it’s surprising that it hasn’t been talked about all that much in that context actually. He managed to help get something really constructive going after the failure of [the 2009 climate summit in] Copenhagen.”

Geall said China’s leaders, who have vowed to cut coal consumption and draw 20% of the country’s energy from non-fossil fuels by 2030, also deserved praise for their commitment to cleaning up. “Not only is it the one area where there is productive US-China cooperation, but it is the one area where China is actively behaving like a superpower and they are actually taking on the responsibility of having that immense weight in the emissions talks. They really have shown some leadership and that has been reflected through the UN climate process.”

Beijing’s resolve was the result of a growing awareness of the dangers of pollution and climate change and how “there is a national interest in China in the low carbon transition and in being the leading suppliers of the clean technologies that we will need in a carbon-constrained world”.

Jake Schmidt of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council said: “Only a few short years ago, countries were trying to drag the US and China into the global climate agreements and now these two countries are among the first to join the new legal regime. That is an important shift in the dynamic.”

Nick Mabey of the UK-based environmental thinktank, E3G, said: “US and Chinese ratification sends a strong signal to investors and businesses that they can continue investing on the assumption that the Paris climate deal will be delivered.”

Bob Ward of the London School of Economics said the move would encourage other countries to move quickly and added: “Importantly, it should also make it more difficult for Donald Trump to renege on the Paris agreement if he becomes president of the US.”

The announcement came on day one of what is likely to be Obama’s last visit to Asia as president. Nick Bisley, an international relations professor from La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the pre-G20 Obama-Xi summit was part of a final “love-in” between the two leaders.

The upbeat farewell was symptomatic of the “really complex relationship” that now existed between the two powers. “On the one hand, the geopolitics of it is really becoming fraught. And yet around economic areas and a few other policy sectors there is actually quite a reasonable amount of cooperation and positive connections going on,” Bisley said. “It’s not a simple: we’re either involved in an arm wrestle or we are not.”

Li, the Greenpeace activist, described the announcement as “an important political move [that] completes a cycle in the cooperation between these two countries”.

But with US elections on the horizon and the possibility of Donald Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a Chinese conspiracy, becoming president, Li said there were fears political change might undo the progress achieved by the US and China. “We simply can’t afford any backsliding,” he said, adding: “Here I think I worry definitely more about the US side.”