Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will try to be brief. My presentation is entitled “International Climate Change”. I will be speaking mostly in English, but I will be pleased to answer your questions in French.
As you will have seen in the document Mr. McDougall mentioned earlier, Environment Canada is a party to more than 85 international environmental agreements. We thus have an enormous international presence regarding environmental matters.
Of course, the major event which to some degree colours everything we do in the context of these international agreements is the Paris Conference, which took place in December, as well as the agreement we negotiated that month. My comments will mostly be focused on that event, but I will be pleased to answer any other questions.
The Conference of the Parties under the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, changed our world on international climate change. It was one of the biggest conferences of the parties ever to take place under the convention. Over 40,000 participants attended this conference, and it shows the importance that the world is putting on this issue. The negotiations were the culmination of four years of negotiations on an international agreement with legal force applicable to all countries. That is the key difference compared to most efforts that have been undertaken in the past on climate change. This agreement is universal and is applicable to 195 countries. That is unprecedented. It is a significant step and it is a big success on its own. It also comes with its challenges, of course. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but that was an incredible success.
Slide 3 is a bit of an overview of our key approach going into Paris for this negotiation. We wanted to go there with an approach that was very inclusive with regard to provinces, territories, and stakeholders. You probably saw that the Canadian delegation was very diverse and brought in key stakeholders. Our commissioner was there along with businesses, ENGOs, youth, and aboriginal leaders. They were there to advise us and provide us with input, and we met with them regularly. The approach that we took to the negotiations was very inclusive.
We went there with a mandate to make sure that this agreement was based on robust science, and I think that actually permeated or influenced a lot of the negotiations. Actually, the agreement calls for continued improvements to the science as we go through future cycles of targets and commitments. It calls for a lot of work on science as well, which Karen will be involved in.
A key outcome of the agreement that was part of our approach was the necessity to transition to a low-carbon resilient economy. That is basically at the core of the agreement. You will see that this is the ultimate goal of the agreement: to transition to a low-carbon economy. The long-term goal and commitment is to reach carbon neutrality by the second half of this century. One long-term goal is to maintain our temperature rise at 2°, as you know, with an effort to further reduce that to 1.5°. It's a very ambitious agreement and also a progressive and dynamic agreement, under which countries will undertake new commitments every five years, which will be ever more stringent to help us go towards these goals.
There's a more prominent role for adaptation in this agreement. In terms of ensuring that we support adaptation, developing countries require a lot of support there, so climate finance and supporting developing countries in their efforts to adapt and mitigate was also a key part of the agreement.
Canada played a very active role in the negotiation of this agreement. We facilitated some key aspects of the agreement. We also joined many of the complementary international initiatives or declarations. I've listed some of them on slide 4.
The key point I wanted to make was that implementing the Paris agreement will not do it on its own. This requires mobilizing pretty much the global community through many other fora, including mobilizing the private sector. We're going to be working in parallel in many other forums to advance and to try to mobilize complementary efforts for the agreement. Working on implementing all the details on the agreement is not the end in itself.
On slide 5 I wanted to flag some the climate finance we've announced in Paris. The government announced $2.65 billion to support developing countries on climate finance. We've announced some key initiatives there. This was very well received and helped also in our negotiations.
On slides 6 and 7 I wanted to flag some of the key complementary initiatives we're going to be working under, as I've mentioned.
The key one is Canada has just undertaken the co-chair role of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. This is dealing with methane and HFCs and other short-lived climate forces; those are key gases to target to reach our target, so we're going to be working with our North American partners under this body.
The Arctic Council is now under U.S. chairmanship, but Canada just finished the chairmanship there. There was a lot of work there to advance some of these issues.
The last one that's key to mention is our efforts to phase out HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons. That's under the Montreal protocol. We've been working very closely with Mexico and the U.S. under the Montreal protocol. Mike can talk more about this, but that's also a key initiative to be able to reach our objective and to support the Paris agreement.
I have just a few words in closing about our next step on this agreement. There will be a signing ceremony for the agreement hosted by the UN Secretary-General on April 22. Then the agreement will be open for ratification, starting pretty much on that date. There is a lot of outreach from the Secretary-General and from other countries, especially the U.S., to try to get an early entry into force of the Paris agreement, so we might see a number of countries actually ratifying on the spot, maybe on April 22, but we're not sure about that at this point. The agreement comes into force when 55 countries representing 55% of global emissions have ratified.
Then we're going to continue. There is a lot of work. There's a huge work program as part of the Paris agreement between now and 2020. We're going to start that in May. The next COP, in Marrakesh, will also be key on some of the decisions around the details of the Paris agreement.
I will stop here.
Thank you.