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Nearly 200 Countries Agree On Global Climate Pact Rules After Impasse (reuters.com)
"Nearly 200 countries overcame political divisions late on Saturday to agree on rules for implementing a landmark global climate deal," reports Reuters. "After two weeks of talks in the Polish city of Katowice, nations finally reached consensus on a more detailed framework for the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit a rise in average world temperatures to 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels." From the report: Before the talks started, many expected the deal would not be as robust as needed. The unity which underpinned the Paris talks has fragmented, and U.S. President Donald Trump intends to pull his country - one of the world's biggest emitters - out of the pact. At the 11th hour, ministers managed to break a deadlock between Brazil and other countries over the accounting rules for the monitoring of carbon credits, deferring the bulk of that discussion to next year, but missing an opportunity to send a signal to businesses to speed up their actions. Still, exhausted ministers managed to bridge a series of divides to produce a 156-page rulebook - which is broken down into themes such as how countries will report and monitor their national pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions and update their emissions plans.
Not everyone is happy with everything, but the process is still on track and it is something to build on, several ministers said. Some countries and green groups criticized the outcome for failing to urge increased ambitions on emissions cuts sufficiently to curb rising temperatures. Poorer nations vulnerable to climate change also wanted more clarity on how an already agreed $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 will be provided and on efforts to build on that amount further from the end of the decade.
Not everyone is happy with everything, but the process is still on track and it is something to build on, several ministers said. Some countries and green groups criticized the outcome for failing to urge increased ambitions on emissions cuts sufficiently to curb rising temperatures. Poorer nations vulnerable to climate change also wanted more clarity on how an already agreed $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 will be provided and on efforts to build on that amount further from the end of the decade.
The agreement is as legally binding as the Kellogg-Briand pact.
From what I can tell, there are no actual new commitments. The existing non-binding Paris agreement targets remain nominally in-effect.
The new agreement provides advice on how a country should self-measure their emissions such that the measurement procedures have some consistency to them.
However, if a country decides to not to follow that advice, there is literally nothing that will be done about it.
Furthermore, if they measure the emissions properly, but emissions are in excess of the Paris agreement emissions targets, there is literally nothing that will be done about that either.
Furthermore, none of reports have to be delivered until 2024, at the earliest.
This is what I was able to tell based on some articles I found. As for all I can tell the text of the actual agreement is secret and no one has ever read it, not even those who wrote or signed it.
If this is not the case, and you have access to either the agreement or a decent summary thereof, you would have posted it already.