Hollande to talk climate change on China visit
Print Edition
FRENCH President Francois Hollande will head to Beijing today to try and persuade China, a key country in the fight against global warming, to give a decisive push to negotiations ahead of a key climate conference in Paris.
He hopes to use his state visit to China to boost difficult climate negotiations a month before the United Nations conference.
Hollande said he intends to launch a bilateral appeal with Chinese President Xi Jinping “to make the climate conference a success.”
France is notably trying to get China’s approval of a mechanism that would require countries to step up their emissions cuts over time.
The conference, which will be attended by at least 80 world leaders including Xi and United States President Barack Obama, will seek to unite all the world’s nations in a single agreement on tackling climate change, with the goal of capping warming at 2 degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
China has “a leading role” in influencing other developing countries on this issue, a French diplomat said. France is proposing to update those emissions targets automatically every five years, but the rules have yet to be defined.
China has already promised its carbon dioxide emissions will peak “by about 2030” in an announcement in June.
In September, China committed in a joint declaration with the US to set up a national emissions quota system in 2017.
Hollande will today visit Chongqing in southwest China, where he’ll see examples of the country’s efforts toward more environmentally friendly technologies. Later in the day, he’ll travel to Beijing to meet the Chinese president.
Tomorrow, Hollande will meet with Prime Minister Li Keqiang and they will speak to a Chinese-French economic forum on green growth. He will then go to South Korea for a one-day visit.
The Chinese president is expected to travel to France on November 30 for the opening of the UN conference, which will run until December 11.
Travelling with Hollande is a delegation of about 40 business leaders as well as the ministers of foreign affairs, ecology and finance.
The French president’s China trip comes hot on the heels of a similar visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who arrived last Thursday hoping to drum up business. Several major European Union countries, including Germany, France and Britain, are wooing China in the hope of winning business and becoming hubs for the growing overseas trade of its yuan currency.
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