Source: reuters.com

OSLO (Reuters) - Government plans for slowing climate change remain ‘woefully inadequate’ despite promises of tougher action under the 2015 Paris agreement, according to Fiji, which will preside at United Nations talks in Germany next week.

Officials from almost 200 nations will work on a “rule book” for the Paris accord at the April 30-May 10 meeting in Bonn. The pact aims to end the fossil fuel era this century but has been weakened by U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw.

Fiji praised governments for action including a deal this month to cut greenhouse gas emissions from shipping by 2050. And no nations have followed Trump in planning to quit.

But overall “the current commitments nationally are woefully inadequate,” Luke Daunivalu, Fiji’s chief negotiator, told Reuters in a telephone interview. Fiji is the current president of the U.N. negotiations. 

Dozens of nations, including China, Saudi Arabia and European Union states, have submitted documents to the United Nations in recent weeks about the state of global climate action.

“One recurrent, cross-cutting theme was that the scale and pace of climate action must increase dramatically, and immediately so” to avoid dangerous man-made climate change, Fiji wrote in a document summing up the proposals.