The recent COP 23 United Nations climate change talks exposed a serious divide among parties to the 2015 Paris Agreement over the rules of implementation of the accord to combat global warming. The conference held in Bonn, Germany, in mid-November was the first since the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump announced the country's departure from the Paris accord in June. As one of the leading advanced economies and major emitters of greenhouse gases, Japan is urged to take the lead for moving the process forward for achieving the goal of eliminating net carbon dioxide emissions in the latter half of the century by revamping its own efforts against climate change.

Unlike in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which imposed the duty of reducing greenhouse gas emissions solely on industrialized nations, both advanced and developing economies are committed to the fight against climate change under the Paris accord by setting voluntary goals for cutting their emissions. The problem is that the targets set by the parties so far won't realize the pact's goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures to within 2 degrees of pre-industrial levels. The agreement envisages efforts by the participating countries to keep upgrading measures to trim their emissions.

Ahead of the COP 23 conference, the World Meteorological Organization reported that the world's average temperature in the first nine months of this year was 14.8 degrees — or an increase of 1.1 degrees since before the industrial revolution. That means the world is already past the halfway point to the climate change that the Paris accord is seeking to avert. It is estimated that the total emission of greenhouse gases must be contained within roughly 1,000 gigatons to keep the rise in global temperatures within 2 degrees, but nearly two-thirds that amount has already been emitted. If countries keep emitting gases at the current pace, total emissions are forecast to break the threshold in less than 30 years.