The two countries have submitted their ratification documents for the Paris Agreement to the United Nations. However, it cannot yet enter into force.
US president Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping announced the ratification, by their respective countries, of the Paris Agreement — that is, the deal reached last December in the French capital at the close of the twenty-first United Nations world climate conference (Cop 21).
This is a fundamental step, given that the US and China are precisely the two nations that emit the highest volumes of greenhouse gases worldwide. Above all, the submission of the documents to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon represents a concrete advance in the process towards the agreement's entry into force.
The Paris Agreement will in fact become fully operational once a minimum of 55 countries have followed in the footsteps of Washington and Beijing, provided that they account for at least 55 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions. According to what has been specified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the ratification by the United States and China brings the total, in terms of emissions, to more than 39 per cent.
This share therefore represents the countries that have completed the procedure, declaring their intention to incorporate the Agreement into their own legal order. Many other nations remain at the preceding stage — that of simple signature (which is therefore not equivalent to ratification): 180 governments have already reached this step (including those that subsequently went on to complete the full process: 26, China and the United States included).
Compared with the 195 countries that had taken part in Cop 21, only a small number of states have so far neither signed nor, still less, ratified the text. The latter commits the signatory nations to adopting policies capable of limiting the increase in average global surface temperature to two degrees centigrade by 2100, relative to pre-industrial levels — striving, as the Agreement itself states, "to get as close as possible to 1.5 degrees".
However, the "sum" of the pledges made by nations so far does not allow entry onto such a trajectory. According to calculations by the French government, if the commitments are not revised further, the outcome will be +2.7 degrees (above 3 according to projections by environmental organisations). At Cop 22 in Marrakech — to be held in the Moroccan city in the first half of November — it will therefore be essential, above all, for each country to understand the need to make greater efforts in the coming years than those made so far.