Joe Biden, February 2, 2021 in Washington.

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SAUL LOEB / AFP

The United States is officially back on Friday in the Paris Agreement, when the administration of President Joe Biden has committed to making the fight against climate change a high priority.

Almost four years after Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States, this return of the world's largest economy, the second largest emitter of CO2, means that almost all the nations of the planet have now left stakeholders in the agreement signed in 2015. In office on January 20, Joe Biden immediately decided on this return.

A climate summit on April 22

“Climate change and science-based diplomacy can never again be optional additions to our foreign policy discussions,” US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said in a statement.

Praising the Paris agreement, negotiated by former President Barack Obama, he further assured that the climate diplomacy that lay ahead would be crucial.

Former Secretary of State and candidate for the White House John Kerry, now emissary for the climate of the United States, for his part called on the States of the planet to revise their climate ambitions upwards during of the UN summit in Glasgow (Scotland) which will take place in November.

Prior to that, Joe Biden planned to hold another climate summit on April 22 to coincide with Earth Day.

The US president has pledged to reduce pollution levels in the US energy sector to zero by 2035, and that the US economy will achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. His predecessor, Donald Trump, ally of the fossil fuel industry, was of the opinion that the Paris agreement was unfair to the United States.

More and more victims

But the ambitions of the agreement are mostly non-binding, with each country developing its own measures.

A point on which Barack Obama and John Kerry insisted when signing in 2015, concerned about the political opposition in the United States.

The Paris agreement aims to limit the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial revolution levels, and to continue efforts to limit this rise to 1.5 degrees.

The current political momentum is in the direction of greater environmental ambition, at a time when the consequences of climate change are becoming more and more visible.

A recent study claims that 480,000 people have already died in this century due to natural disasters linked to extreme weather events.

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