African Climes

 The Paris Agreement is a climate change treaty that was signed in Le Bourget, Paris, France by 197 countries on 12th December 2015. It is one of the most widely subscribed to international agreements having near universal acceptance. It succeeds the Kyoto Protocol and is to ‘govern’ from 2020 onwards. The Agreement is based on the parent treaty of the UN Climate Change Convention, which is the basis for all international laws about climate change. The fact that climate change is a global challenge is what informs international cooperation on the issue because emissions anywhere affects life everywhere. Therefore, for action taken to be successful, all parties must be involved and everybody’s voice heard. This agreement, which tries to be holistic, looks at all aspects of climate change and involves all stakeholders. It is different from the previous one because it involves the participation of both developed and developing countries in mitigation (cutting emissions) and is ‘bo...

Now, the era we are living in, climate is changing dangerously as a result ofthe discovery and exploitation of coal which started in the year 1750, the beginning of the Industrial Age. In the eighties, it was noticed that global climate was changing that is was warming up. So in the year 1988 Anno Domino, the powers that be decided to do something appropriate to show that they are doing something. So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization. This is the body tasked with finding scientific, technical evidence of climate change, making predictions etc. It is made up of scientists who know their stuff. They have no other goal or purpose apart from scientificallyexamining the issue of climate change and also making predictions on adaptation and mitigation. The reason why the IPCC is so important is because it provides actual data with which the rest of us can work with. In...