Climate deal ‘binding’ or not US and France clash

French President Francois Hollande on Thursday stood by the need for a “binding” agreement at an upcoming world climate summit starting in Paris at the end of the month.

Mr Hollande touched on the nature of the accord after US Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out that the proposed deal would not include greenhouse-gas curbs backed by tough legal provisions of the kind agreed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

“If there is not a binding accord, there will not be an accord,” Mr Hollande said at an EU-Africa summit in Malta after being asked about Mr Kerry’s remarks.

“It’s definitively not going to be a treaty... They’re not going to be legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto or something,” Mr Kerry told the Financial Times earlier this week.

The November 30-December 11 conference will be conducted between the members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The summit aims to secure a post-2020 deal to stave off potentially catastrophic levels of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. The deal that will prevent Earth from warming by more than two degrees Celsius.