Canada pressured to match tough climate talk with leadership at key meeting
OTTAWA — The Canadian government is under intense pressure to fill a leadership void as countries try to hammer out how they will hold themselves accountable for implementing the Paris climate-change accord.
Political leaders from most countries are in the small, coal-mining city of Katowice in southern Poland for the 24th meeting of the United Nations “Conference of the Parties,” where the rulebook for the Paris agreement is supposed to be finalized.
With the United States preparing to leave the Paris agreement altogether, the host country less than enthusiastic about it and the biggest European powers distracted by domestic events like the Brexit crisis and riots against a fuel tax in France, Canada is being pushed to lead where they can’t or won’t.
The rules decided at Katowice are to dictate everything from how carbon markets work to what each country must do to report on their own emissions cuts and how they’ve helped finance the decarbonization of the developing world.