President Barack Obama on Tuesday painted a bleak picture of what the world will look like if climate change is not addressed. Obama strayed from the usual depictions of rising sea levels, raging forest fires, and melting ice caps, focusing instead on the human impacts of climate change. “If we don’t act boldly, the bill that could come due will be mass migrations, and cities submerged and nations displaced, and food supplies decimated, and conflicts born of despair,” Obama said during an address to the United Nations General Assembly.
To avoid these impacts, the world must move beyond the Paris Agreement, working to outpace the commitments made in the agreement, he said. “The Paris Agreement gives us a framework to act, but only if we scale up our ambition,” he said.
Nearly 200 nations adopted the agreement in December 2015 at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is the first fully global climate change agreement, requiring action from developed and developing nations.
Still, it is widely accepted that the accord is not ambitious enough to reach its stated goal, limiting global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. The agreement, though, established a review cycle, which requires nations to ramp up the ambition of their climate goals every five years.
The ratification process for the accord is still ongoing. The agreement will enter into force 30 days after 55 nations representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have formally joined. “There must be a sense of urgency about bringing the agreement into force and helping poorer countries leapfrog destructive forms of energy,” Obama said.
As of the conclusion of a special United Nations event for nations to join the agreement Wednesday morning, 60 nations representing 47.76 percent of global emissions have formally joined.
Obama also called on developed nations to work to develop technology to address climate change and to help deploy those technologies in the developing world. “For the wealthiest countries, a Green Climate Fund should only be the beginning. We need to invest in research and provide market incentives to develop new technologies, and then make these technologies accessible and affordable for poorer countries. And only then can we continue lifting all people up from poverty without condemning our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair,” Obama said.