French Environment Minister Segolene Royal said yesterday that she would take over the presidency of UN climate talks COP21, seeking to implement a global deal reached last year to shift away from fossil fuels, after former foreign minister Laurent Fabius quit.
Royal said that she had accepted a request from French President Francois Hollande to serve out the United Nations presidency, lasting until the next annual meeting of 195 nations on global warming in Marrakech in Morocco, in November.
Hollande “offered me the opportunity yesterday to take on this responsibility, and I accepted”, she told French television news channel iTELE.
A spokesman for Hollande’s office confirmed the appointment but said a date had not been set.
COP21 is the acronym for the 21st conference of parties to the UN climate arena.
Its president comes from the country who hosts the forum’s annual high-level gathering, and usually plays a key role in brokering agreements in the complex negotiations.
Fabius, who won praise for chairing a Paris summit in December at which all nations agreed to curb their greenhouse gas emissions to limit rising temperatures, quit the foreign ministry last week to head France’s constitutional court.
Royal told iTele television that she would work to ensure that all countries “ratify the agreement, sign this agreement, implement the decisions in their domestic policies to permit a fight against global warming”.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will host a meeting in New York on April 22, opening the Paris Agreement for signatures, one step towards formal ratification.
On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama’s climate envoy, Todd Stern, said that Washington would sign the Paris agreement regardless of a decision by the US Supreme Court last week to put a chunk of Obama’s environmental action on hold.
Fabius was pressured to relinquish the UN climate talks presidency on Monday after he stepped down as foreign minister and was named to head France’s constitutional court.
Critics have argued that the former foreign minister could not simultaneously be on the court, which is supposed to be above the political fray, and at the same time also be in charge of the COP, where politics and powerful interests collide.
Royal, Hollande’s former companion and the mother of their four children, was among the first to raise objections, calling for “the rules to be clarified” on double postings.
In her new role, Royal will guide the first steps for implementing the December agreement, which set the ambitious goal of capping global warming at “well under 2° Celsius” (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
The 32-page deal also calls on rich nations to muster at least $100bn (€90bn) a year in climate aid from 2020.
Just how that will happen has yet to be worked out.
“We can’t let the momentum slip,” Royal told AFP. “There’s a lot to do. I have already started.”
Among her priorities, she said, are putting a price on carbon and climate action in Africa.
“Africa can be a laboratory for transitioning away from fossil fuels using solar, geothermal, hydroelectricity,” she said. “We need a systematic approach, and we have to get moving before the end of 2016.”
France will hand over the climate baton to Morocco, which will organise COP22 in Marrakesh later this year, from November 7 to 18.