ABU DHABI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th January, 2020) The small island nations of the Caribbean, which are most vulnerable to the dangers of climate change, are on track to exceed their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets under the Paris Agreement, Wilfred Arthur Abrahams, the Barbados minister of energy and water resources, told Sputnik in an interview.
The NDCs, the post-2020 climate actions outlined and communicated by each party to the accord, aim to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
"Most Caribbean territories are probably going to exceed their Paris climate agreement commitments, because for us it is a matter of necessity. We are the affected ones. Look at what happened in the Bahamas [after Hurricane Dorian] the other day. With one storm you can wipe off the entire country. You can put everyone out of work, out of housing, you can eventually force the abandonment of the country. For us, the Paris thresholds are a bit low. We would like to see the world step up [its commitments]," Abrahams said.
The minister went on to slam the most polluting countries for their unimpressive commitments under the Paris climate deal.
"The big industrial countries, the big polluters are hiding behind very low thresholds and are not doing what is necessary. We need to be moving as a global community toward the elimination of fossil fuel-based generation electricity," the minister added.
While the 2015 Paris Agreement was designed as a collective treaty, individual countries, especially big economies with sizable carbon footprints, might fail to implement their pledges, which could, in turn, derail the deal's key premise. The agreement ambitiously seeks to bring all nations into the common cause of combating climate change and keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) � ideally by 1.5 degrees Celsius � above pre-industrial levels. The deal has no compliance mechanism.
The United States, one of the biggest economies and the country responsible for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, gave official notice to the United Nations of its withdrawal from the Paris accord in November.
