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PARIS – TURNING POINT TO CLIMATE RESILIENT, SUSTAINABLE FUTURE The Paris Agreement, backed by unprecedented business and public support and a set of national climate action plans from almost every country on the planet, is the turning point towards a sustainable economic revolution based on clean power, restored eco-systems and societies properly proofed against existing climate change.   The stresses and strains of immediate challenges in the world must not mask the fact that last year countries under the United Nations reached a triple, coordinated set of agreements, including Paris, the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the global Disaster and Risk Reduction agreement.This represents the most comprehensive ever global response to the existential challenge we face, rooted in the need to keep the global average temperature rise below two degrees and preferably at only 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Remember that close to one degree of that rise is already in the system. The international insurance industry has already warned that a world above 2 degrees would become, quite literally, uninsurable.PARIS GOALS ARE THE SINGLE ASSURANCE OF ULTIMATE SUCCESSParis delivered the ambitious goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change quickly enough as the one assurance that unmanageable temperature rise will not derail sustainable development or overwhelm our ability to deal with future extreme climate impacts.Meaningful and effective climate change action has two overarching aims.First, decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth by transforming the global economy onto a low-carbon pathway as rapidly as possible, ending the era in which fossil fuels are the dominant source of energy.Second, building a much higher level of resilience into economies and societies so they can weather increasingly extreme climate - in other words, decoupling impacts from economic damage and human suffering.The urgency of this transformation is especially critical for developing countries as it is those nations that will suffer the most acute and frequent climate impacts, continuously undermining their capacity to eradicate poverty and strengthen their economies.Ultimate success will come only from peaking global emissions soon – stopping their current annual rise – and then reversing them very rapidly to a point as soon as possible later this century when remaining greenhouse gas emissions are absorbed back from the atmosphere by healthy land and forest eco-systems.Paris’s goals call for unprecedented rates of emissions reduction while the short time of 15 years to 2030 will need to deliver unprecedented outcomes in terms of global well-being and poverty eradication. The realization that climate change and development are solvable only when seen as inseparable is articulated clearly in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. The SDGs not only contain a “ THE ABSOLUTE KEY TO THE NEW ECONOMY, THEREFORE, IS THAT ALL NEW INVESTMENT BE DIRECTED AT PRIORITIES WHICH TARGET BOTH CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY ”CHRISTIANA FIGUERES, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, UN FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE 116 SUMMATION