High level UN climate change talks in Marrakech that began over the weekend have brought back the focus of global media to global warming and how to tackle it, after weeks of acrimonious coverage of the US presidential election.

“Reaching a global agreement on climate change took more than 20 years of tortuous negotiations. Signed just under a year ago, the insufficient but workable Paris agreement at last constructed a legally binding framework for the principle of cutting carbon emissions,” said the Guardian in an editorial. Connecting the climate talks with the change of guard in the White House, the paper said: “It was to be the foundation of a sustained ratcheting up of ambition that would hold global warming below 2C. Last Tuesday night, as one by one from east coast to west the United States went Republican red, that progress was wiped out. Mr [Donald] Trump cannot instantly extricate the US from the Paris accord: legal technicalities means withdrawal would take four years, although he may try to speed up the process. That, though, is just legal stuff. His chilling effect on climate negotiations has already begun… With a hostile US, China may cool on its commitments, or at least take a tougher stance. India was already a reluctant participant and the change in the US position is likely only to make its grumbles louder.”

Weighing in on the debate, the New York Times said: “The answer to global warming lies not in one grand strategy but in a steady progression of measures deploying many different technologies… Countries have an enormous amount of work to do on all climate-changing pollutants, chiefly carbon dioxide.”

In India, the Hindu newspaper observed that the Morocco conference “has the ambitious task of drawing up the first steps on enhanced finance and technology transfer, which is vital to advance the Paris Agreement that entered into force on November 4,” and said: “Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is central to the effort to contain the rise of the global average temperature in the current century to well below 2° Celsius since pre-industrial levels. But that goal is considered impossible even if sincere action is taken on all pledges made so far, necessitating a higher ambition. Moreover, the Paris Agreement does not have a carbon budget system that gives weightage to the emerging economies taking their historical handicap into account. The imperative therefore is to demand suitably high financial flows to both mitigate emissions and prepare communities to adapt to climate change. Such a mandate should be seen as an opportunity, since CoP 22 will discuss ways and means for countries to integrate their national commitments submitted for the Paris deal into actual policies and investment plans.”

The Nikkei Review in Japan took a similar view and said: “It is no secret that Asia accounts for a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change has kicked in, the region shares the responsibility for making it work. The pact, which took effect on November 4, is the first international framework to involve virtually every country – from advanced economies such as the US, Japan and European nations to emerging giants and developing markets. China, the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, is on board, as is No. 4 polluter India. Although the Paris Agreement sets out global warming countermeasures for the period from 2020 onward, there is plenty of work to do right away.”