ANKARA
A new 2015 agreement to tackle climate change across the world has been signed by over 190 countries after two weeks of negotiations, the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change announced in Lima, Peru, Sunday.
The countries agreed on a plan to fight global warming that would help form a possible binding agreement in Paris in 2015.
The delegates from almost 200 nations worked on a draft document at the two-week summit in Lima, which sought to move beyond the Kyoto Protocol. It will be negotiated and ratified next year in Paris.
Countries all over the world have failed for more than two decades to achieve a durable agreement to prevent global temperatures from rising 3.6 Fahrenheit (2 Celsius) on pre-industrial levels before the century’s end - an increase deemed “dangerous” by scientists.
“Nations concluded by elaborating the elements of the new agreement, scheduled to be agreed in Paris in late 2015, while also agreeing the ground rules on how all countries can submit contributions to the new agreement during the first quarter of next year,” an official statement released on the UN Climate Change official webpage said.
During the two weeks conference, countries “achieved a range of other important outcomes and decisions and 'firsts' in the history of the international climate process,” the statement said.
“Governments arrived in Lima on a wave of positive news and optimism resulting from the climate action announcements of the European Union, China and the United States to the scaling up of pledges for the Green Climate Fund,” Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework on Climate Change, said.
According to the agreement, both developed and developing countries have pledged $10 billion to the fund.
Turkey, one of the parties to the UN convention, is stepping up efforts to reduce emissions, which have multiplied by a factor of two-and-a-half since 1990 as its population and economy surged over the years.
Greenhouse gas emissions rose from 180 million tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to 439 million in 2012, according to Turkey's national statistics agency.
In addition, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said last month that climate change was a top priority and vowed to use Turkey’s G20 presidency to act on what he called the biggest issue facing humanity.
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