Ayşe Hümeyra Atılgan
12 December 2015•Update: 14 December 2015
PARIS
The final draft of the climate change deal has been agreed in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced Saturday following a two-week UN summit in the French capital.
"If adopted, this text will mark a historic turning point," Fabius, who is also the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) president, said at a press conference attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and French President Francois Hollande.
Fabius said that the overall goal written in the deal would be "to have a mean temperature [increase] well below 2 degrees - and to endeavor to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees".
In his remarks, Ban Ki-moon said: "The final draft is historic and sets world on new path to low emissions, climate-resilient future.
"The end is in sight. Let us now finish the job. The whole world is watching," he said. "The solutions to climate change are on the table. They are ours for the taking. Let us have the courage to grasp them," he added.
Hollande said that final draft was "ambitious, but realistic".
"The agreement will not be perfect for everyone, if everyone reads it with only their own interests in mind," he said. "We will not be judged on a clause in a sentence, but on the text as a whole. We will not be judged on a word, but on an act," he added.
Delegates of 196 parties held negotiations in Paris in a bid to strike a deal on carbon emissions. An estimated 150 heads of states, including Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama attended the climate change conference on Nov. 30.
