After Trump's Paris Agreement exit, focus on state and municipal level climate change mitigation, says IPCC chairperson

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: The rollback of pledges by a major economy can lead to missed global climate mitigation targets, but state- and municipal-level policies can still bear positive impacts, said Jim Skea, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Skea said that withdrawing from an agreement may not mean the country will stop all climate change mitigation activities.

"If they (countries) both leave the Paris Agreement and reduce their efforts, manifestly, it makes the targets, the goals, harder to reach, or other people will have to step in and do more," he said in an interview. His comments come against the backdrop of president Donald Trump taking the US out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Environment minister Bhupender Yadav on Wednesday called for reforms to the global governance on climate change.

Yadav called upon developed countries to honour their financial and technological commitments, especially the obligations made under the Paris Agreement a decade ago. "Action is a function, not only of national action, but things can happen at the sub national level, the city level, or even through corporates," Skea said on the sidelines of the World Sustainable Development Summit by The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) in New Delhi on Thursday. "One of the things that we did in the last cycle -- there were some papers that attempted to work out how much of climate action is attributable to national level policies, and how much is attributable to city and state level.