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You can read our report on the news that the US and China have agreed to formally ratify the Paris agreement below.
Theresa May says UK will be 'global leader' for free trade
Theresa May has said the UK will be a “global leader” for free trade following the Brexit vote, ahead of Sunday’s G20 summit.
The PM, who faces a row with Beijing over the delayed decision on the Hinkley Point power station, maintained that we were in a “golden era” for UK-China relations.
Speaking at Heathrow before boarding an RAF plane to Hangzhou, May said:
The message for the G20 is that Britain is open for business, as a bold, confident, outward-looking country we will be playing a key role on the world stage.
This is a golden era for UK-China relations and one of the things I will be doing at the G20 is obviously talking to president Xi about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China.
But I will also be talking to other world leaders about how we can develop free trade around the world and Britain wants to seize those opportunities.
My ambition is that Britain will be a global leader in free trade.
Summary
The main story of today has been that the US has joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions.
Barack Obama and Xi Jinping submitted their plan to join the agreement to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is in China to witness the announcement, ahead of the G20 summit tomorrow.
The joint declaration could help put the pact into force before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, German chancellor Angela Merkel has said she hopes to discuss Ukraine, Syria and refugee issues in bilateral talks on the sidelines of the summit.
And former security minister Dame Pauline Neville-Jones has said reassurances are needed from China on security issues surrounding the Hinkley Point project before a decision on its future can be reached.
China looks forward to fruitful Xi-Obama meeting during #G20, says Zhu Guangyao, China's vice finance minister pic.twitter.com/4bBI49lF5J
— G20china (@G20_China) September 2, 2016
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (L) arrives in Hangzhou to attend the G20 Summit Saturday.@UN_Spokesperson @UN pic.twitter.com/KYSEGSH5GE
— G20china (@G20_China) September 3, 2016
President Xi met Turkish leader Erdogan on Saturday, pledging deepened counter-terrorism and energy cooperation pic.twitter.com/IGSfWnsXet
— G20china (@G20_China) September 3, 2016
Oxfam’s head of food and climate change campaign, Robin Willoughby, has welcomed the news that the world’s two biggest emitters, China and the US, will be ratifying the Paris agreement and bringing this historic deal closer to entry into force.
Willoughby added, however, that “whilst dozens of countries have taken the lead to make the agreement legally binding, the UK is not among them.”
“If the UK is to continue to justify its reputation as a global leader on climate change, the Government must ratify the Paris agreement as soon as possible,” he said. “This deal can offer a lifeline for the world’s poorest people who are already feeling the full force of our changing climate.”
Patricia Espinosa, the UN’s top climate official, has thanked the US and China for ratifying the Paris agreement.
Espinosa said in a statement Saturday that the accord offers an “opportunity for a sustainable future for every nation and every person.”
She added: “The earlier that Paris is ratified and implemented in full, the more secure that future will become.”
Following the earlier climate announcement, Barack Obama has reportedly told his host Xi Jinping the pair now need to have “candid talks” on topics such as human rights and maritime issues.
Reuters is reporting Obama made the comments when the pair met in Hangzhou ahead of tomorrow’s G20. Xi and Obama are due to dine together tonight after a series of bilateral meetings.
Human rights activists and experts are not expecting US to put China under major pressure, however - at least not in public. Confrontation “would fly in the face of either side’s interests at the moment,” says Nick Bisley, an Asia expert at La Trobe University in Australia.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said the US and China “demonstrated their continued, shared commitment to climate leadership” by formally joining the Paris agreement.
Today, U.S., China joined the #ParisAgreement. Enormously proud to be w/@POTUS in Hangzhou for this historic moment. https://t.co/PWdeL79cAj
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) September 3, 2016
Kerry said in a statement that when the U.S. and China “come together to take action on climate, it moves the needle in a way that no two other nations can accomplish.”
He added that it was essential for the Paris agreement to enter into force as quickly as possible.
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It turns out the American visitor being berated on the tarmac at the airport was not a reporter but Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, who was stopped as she tried to reach the president’s motorcade. It was unclear if the official knew that Rice was a senior official and not a reporter.
The same official shouted at a White House press aide who was instructing foreign reporters on where to stand as they recorded Obama disembarking from the plane. “This is our country. This is our airport,” he said in English.
While news surrounds Obama and Xi, German chancellor Angela Merkel has said she hopes to discuss Ukraine, Syria and refugee issues in bilateral talks on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
Merkel said in her weekly video message on Saturday that she expects “a very lively discussion” at the summit but that the meeting can’t resolve Syria’s civil war, “it can only be a contribution to talks on the sidelines helping in this.”
She said she also hopes for discussions on “how things go forward in Ukraine” and “how things go forward on the issue of flight and migration.”
Merkel didn’t specify who she will hold talks with, though she has said that a four-way meeting with the Turkish, French and Italian leaders is planned.
Here are some responses to the US and China formally joining the Paris deal.
- Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said:
The world finally has a global climate agreement with both the US and China as formal Parties. This signals a new era in global efforts to address climate change. Both countries now need to scale and speed up their efforts in charting a future that avoids the worst impacts of climate change.
- Micheal R. Bloomberg, UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, said:
By ratifying the Paris climate agreement today, the US and China are demonstrating that the world’s two largest economies will help lead the fight against climate change - but it’s imperative that more nations join them. Cities are united in this effort, but to succeed, nations must be too - and I urge local leaders to continue pushing their national governments to ratify the Paris agreement in the months ahead.
- Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said:
Today’s announcement, coupled with other key countries signalling intentions to take similar action, all but assures the Paris agreement will take effect this year. Logistically, negotiations on the agreement’s detailed rules will likely take another year or two to finalise, and all countries will need to raise the ambition of their commitments under the agreement if we’re to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and reach a goal of net zero global warming emissions by mid-century. But this is an important step forward that reinforces the US and China’s continued leadership in building a robust, durable international climate framework.
- Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (a European network of 125 big investors with over €13 Trn in assets), said:
This announcement provides vital momentum for the pace and scale of action required to address the climate challenge. We now urge all the other G20 members to follow this lead by the world’s two largest economies, and to take the steps required to double investment in clean energy by 2020, phase out fossil fuel subsidies swiftly, embrace carbon pricing, strengthen climate-related financial disclosure and take forward the G20 Green Finance agenda.
Updated
Xi Jinping has called on other nations gathering at the G20 summit to follow China’s lead and ratify the Paris agreement. He said other G20 members should “take a leading role” and enter the agreement before the end of the year.
Security at this year’s G20 is so tight that press officers of some national delegations say they are having a hard time figuring out how to brief reporters about the proceedings, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Obama said he believed that history would judge today’s announcement as a “pivotal” moment in the fight against climate change.
The collaboration between the world’s top two economies, showed that it was possible for the US and China to work together, despite disagreements.
“Where there is a will and there is a vision and where countries like China and the United States are prepared to show leadership and to lead by example it is possible for us to create a world that is more secure, more prosperous and more free than the one that was left for us,” he said.
“Despite our differences on other issues we hope that our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire greater ambition and greater action around the world.”
Obama described the Paris agreement as “the single best chance that we have to deal with a problem that could end up transforming this planet in a way that makes it very difficult to deal with all the other challenges that we may face”.
“President Xi and I intend to continue working together in the months ahead to make sure our countries lead on climate,” the outgoing president concluded.
Updated
Together the US and China account for 38.76% of the world’s emissions, and the countries’ joint action brings the Paris agreement substantially closer to the 55% emissions threshold needed for the agreement to enter into force. At least 55 countries must also formally join the agreement for it to take effect.
Everything you need to know about the Paris agreement is on the Climate Nexus website. The key points are as follows:
The Paris Agreement was adopted by all Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015, but there are several formal steps to go through before the agreement enters into force in international law.
The first step: is for countries to sign the agreement. Signing signals that country’s support for the Paris agreement and its intention to align its domestic policies with the agreement terms and start the process of formally joining the agreement.
The second step: undertake domestic processes to formally join (or accept/approve/ratify) the agreement and ‘consent to be bound’ by its terms and deposit the appropriate paperwork with the UN Secretary-General.
The third step: the next phase starts when a sufficient number of countries (55) covering a certain percentage of emissions (55%) have formally joined the Paris agreement. When these two thresholds are met the agreement will enter into force.
Once the conditions of the third step are met, entry into force will occur 30 days after the dual thresholds are achieved. Upon entry into force, the Agreement will become binding international law and countries that have formally joined will be subject to its provisions. Countries that have joined the agreement can only pull out after a period of three years from the day it enters into force. After three years, a country that has joined the agreement can choose to withdraw one year after submitting official notification of its intention. In effect, any country that has joined the agreement will be unable to legally exit the agreement for a period of four years.
A factsheet on the significance of the US/China agreement is also available here.
Obama said cooperation was “the single best chance that we have” to save the planet as he and Xi Jinping formally entered their two nations into the Paris agreement.
“This is not a fight that any one country no matter how powerful can take alone,” Obama said of the pact. “Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”
Xi, speaking through a translator, said he hoped the announcement would spur more countries to take action. “Our response to climate change bears on the future of our people and the wellbeing of mankind,” he said.
Ban Ki-moon said he will hold a high-level event in New York to which he will invite country leaders to formally ratify the agreement.
But it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump has vowed to cancel the agreement.
#Obama bypassed Congress after Republican majority refused to ratify landmark pact. #Trump says he'd cancel deal. https://t.co/LbE5u7rwYl
— Douglas Herbert (@dougf24) September 3, 2016
Updated
US joins China to formally ratify the Paris agreement
The US has joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, which could help put the pact into force before the end of the year.
Obama and Xi Jinping submitted their plan to join the agreement to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is in China to witness the announcement.
"We have a saying in US that you need to put your money where your mouth is" - @POTUS says US will also ratify Paris https://t.co/K0u6Q8e8Ee
— Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsin) September 3, 2016
Senior Obama adviser Brian Deese said the joint declaration by the world’s two biggest economies should push other countries to formally join the agreement. “The signal of the two large emitters taking this step together and taking it early, far earlier than people had anticipated a year ago, should give confidence to the global communities and to other countries that are working on their climate change plans, that they too can move quickly and will be part of a global effort,” Deese told reporters on Friday.
India is also poised to join the agreement this year, Deese said, and Obama is expected to meet Indian prime minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 summit. The joint statement could also spur further ratifications by the likes of Brazil and Canada.
Obama and Xi committed to cooperate on two other global environmental agreements this year - an amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down air-conditioning refrigerants and on a market-based measure to reduce carbon emissions from aviation.
Nearly 200 countries agreed on a binding global compact to slash greenhouse gases and keep global temperature increases to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius in Paris last year. According to experts the temperature target is already in danger of being breached, with the UN’s weather agency saying 2016 is on course to be the warmest year since records began.
Mattlan Zackhras, minister-in-assistance to the president of the Marshall Islands, said today’s announcement was “the strongest signal yet that what we agreed in Paris will soon be the law of the land. With the two biggest emitters ready to lead, the transition to a low-emissions, climate-resilient global economy is now irreversible.”
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, added: “We expect a surge of ratifications around the UN Climate week later in September.”
Updated
While it’s all smiles among the world leaders touching down in Hangzhou for the G20 summit, China is currently experiencing what western diplomats and human rights activists describe as the worst crackdown on free speech and civil society in decades.
A report this afternoon by German press agency DPA claims leading civil society organisations have been banned from taking part in the G20 summit by Chinese authorities. “Basically, there is no representation by civil society at this G20 summit,” one senior employee of a major humanitarian group is quoted as saying by DPA.
Earlier this week Chinese dissidents urged Barack Obama to raise the human rights crisis with Xi Jinping during his final visit to China, describing it as the worst situation since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Ahead of the G20 Sophie Richardson, from Human Rights Watch, has put together a list of steps she believes foreign governments can take to improve the human rights situation in China.
May must seek reassurances on Hinkley, former minister says
Former security minister Dame Pauline Neville-Jones has said reassurances are needed from China on security issues surrounding Hinkley. Speaking on the Today programme, she said:
I think it’s unfortunate the Chinese are left empty handed, but I think it’s fair enough for [May] to want to assure herself that the security side of a very big deal like this does make sense.
The issue is the terms. Clearly Hinkley does have security implications. I think those who assert the Chinese could get into a position of trying to close this down - if that were a serious possibility, relations between the two countries would be so strained that, actually we would have taken the place over anyway. So I don’t think that’s the issue.
The issue, I think, is much more day-to-day security implications of having an investor of that kind who isn’t an ally - not an enemy - but isn’t an ally in the way most investment hitherto in to this country has been from the West.
Neville-Jones said new rules needed to be put in place so China did not feel discriminated against.
My impression is that we do have the notion now that there are strategic investments that we ought to be careful about, but I don’t know that we have a definition of what they are, or indeed, what ground rules should then apply.
Updated
China and the United States will be hoping to publicly play down frictions over thorny issues such as the South China Sea and cyber espionage during Barack Obama’s final trip to the country as president.
But US-China tensions flared almost as soon as Obama touched down in China - under the wing of Air Force One.
A video posted on Twitter by Roberta Rampton, a Reuters White House correspondent, shows a Chinese official berating a visiting journalist who was standing under the wing of the US president’s plane.
Government official was not happy that reporters were under the wing of AF1. WH press aide would not back down. pic.twitter.com/C3JRVIe37K
— Roberta Rampton (@robertarampton) September 3, 2016
Updated
Xi Jinping has just finished delivering a keynote speech to the B20 business summit which is being held in Hangzhou, ahead of the start of the G20 tomorrow.
Xi didn’t reference his country’s decision to formally ratify the Paris climate change agreement earlier today but he did speak about China’s commitment to tackling air and water pollution and to addressing the dangers of global warming.
Here is some of what he said:
We will promote green development to achieve better economic performance. I have said many times that green mountains and clear water are as good as mountains of gold and silver. To protect the environment is to protect productivity and to improve the environment is to boost productivity.
We will unwaveringly pursue sustainable development and stay committed to green, low-carbon and circular development and to China’s fundamental policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment. In promoting green development we also aim to address climate change and overcapacity.
In the next five years China’s water and energy consumption and CO2 emissions per unit of GDP will be cut by 23%, 15% and 18% respectively. We will make China a beautiful country with a blue sky, green vegetation and clear rivers so that our people can enjoy their lives in a liveable environment with the ecological benefits created by economic development.
Leaders gather in China ahead of summit
World leaders are arriving in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou today ahead of the start of the G20 summit on Sunday. Stay with us as we live blog all of the developments that come out of the various meetings and press conferences that take place.
Theresa May’s first major summit
This will be Theresa May’s first major global summit as prime minister, and she hopes to show that the UK remains a dependable diplomatic and trading partner post-Brexit. May will hold talks with world leaders including Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. But the PM is not expected to use the meeting to make an announcement on the Hinkley Point project, which is backed by Beijing’s state-owned nuclear firm – fuelling speculation the plan will be scrapped or significantly altered. A UK government source told the Press Association:
We have set out the government’s approach to Hinkley, we are currently considering all the component parts of that.
We have said we will make a decision this month, that remains the plan. I don’t expect one in the next few days and I don’t expect our Chinese or French partners are expecting one in the next few days.
The French energy giant EDF, with support from China General Nuclear, had expected to build the £18bn plant, but May’s administration signalled a delay in making a final decision on the project amid reports of security concerns about Beijing’s involvement and the high cost of energy from the power station. The final decision is expected to have major diplomatic implications for relations between the UK, France and China.
A climate of change
Meanwhile, China has announced it will formally ratify the Paris climate change agreement, paving the way for a hotly anticipated joint US-China statement on the fight against global warming later today. In a brief dispatch on Saturday morning, China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said members of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, had voted “to review and ratify” the historic deal.
Xi and Obama are expected to meet before the start of the summit to make a joint statement on climate change. Activists believe the centrepiece of that statement, which Chinese and American officials have spent weeks negotiating, will be a formal commitment by both countries to ratify the deal.
Obama has also warned Beijing it must avoid flexing its muscles in the South China Sea. In an interview with CNN, set to be broadcast on Sunday, Obama said he had attempted to convince Xi Jinping of the benefits of restraint.
Frosty start
Putin has described his country’s relationship with the United States as “frozen” during a meeting with the leaders of Japan and South Korea at a forum in Russia today. Russia and the US are both entangled in the Syrian civil war and are negotiating a deal for cooperation, though Russia has backed the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who US officials say should be removed from power. US authorities have also linked cyber-attacks on the Democratic party to Russian-backed hackers, but Putin has denied sanctioning these. While Putin and Obama do not have a meeting scheduled, they are expected to meet on the summit’s sidelines.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said terrorism is a long-term issue for discussion by members of the G20, in the wake of an attempted coup by military officers against him. China is Turkey’s third-largest trading partner, though the two countries have clashed over China’s handling of Uighur minorities who share cultural ties with Turkey. Erdoğan will also meet Obama before the summit begins.
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