COP21: We must speed up and succeed, says Fabius

LE BOURGET, France

The president of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) Laurent Fabius called on the 196 party negotiators to accelerate their work to secure an ambitious agreement by Dec.11.

Delegates of the 196 parties are holding negotiations in Paris in a bid to strike a deal on carbon emissions regulations meant to keep the global average temperature within two degrees Celsius of what it was at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

"My message is quite clear: we must speed up the process because we have a lot of work ahead of us," Fabius told a joint press conference with the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres on Wednesday.

"There is a requirement of success that weighs on us, we must keep it in mind during our work," the French foreign minister stressed, noting that a "draft agreement" was to be delivered to him on Saturday.

Fabius added the Conference that kicked off Monday with the presence of 150 world leaders, was off at a "a good start". He said in all likelihood climate justice "will be the key of the climate agreement".

"This COP is not just a COP of decisions, it's a COP of solutions," he said.

Delegates will try to narrow down the draft text issued at the end of the last session in Bonn, while the second week is reserved for political negotiations to hammer out eventual disagreements.

The key issues to be determined in Paris will be the system to review and scale up emission reductions over time, together with a long-term goal, climate finance, a loss and damage mechanism and the legal force of the “Paris Agreement”.

The negotiations will conclude on Dec. 9 in order to carry out legal and linguistic verifications of the agreement text in six UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and decisions will be adopted on Dec. 10.

The Paris Agreement is to be officially adopted on Dec. 11. The signing is not scheduled on the same day, but for early 2016, during a ceremony organized by the United Nations secretary-general.