The United States will unveil its new commitment to reduce greenhouse gases before the international climate summit organized by Washington on April 22, announced on Tuesday the US climate envoy John Kerry, visiting Paris.
“We will announce our NDC (‘Nationally Determined Contribution’) at the summit on April 22 or a few days before,” Kerry said at a joint press conference with French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire .
New Democratic President Joe Biden has announced the United States is hosting an environmental summit on April 22, Earth Day.
His Republican predecessor Donald Trump had withdrawn the United States from the agreement, but Joe Biden returned to it a few hours after taking office in January.
In 2016, it was John Kerry himself who formally signed the agreement on behalf of the United States, as Barack Obama’s chief diplomat.
The Paris agreement leaves member states free to set their own carbon emission reduction targets, but it obliges them to regularly review their roadmap, in order to contribute to the collective objective: to limit global warming to + 2 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era.
Under Donald Trump’s mandate, the world’s largest economy had given up on formulating objectives. The upcoming announcement from the Biden administration is therefore eagerly awaited, with the United States being the world’s second-largest emitter of CO2 after China.
It is all the more so since the United Nations sounded the alarm at the end of February regarding the climate commitments actually made under the agreement.
According to her, only 75 countries (including EU members) out of the 200 or so signatories to the pact submitted their revised commitments before December 31, 2020, as they had committed to.
“The most important emitters must present much more ambitious emission reduction targets for 2030 in their national contributions well before the Glasgow climate conference (COP26) in November,” insisted UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.