In a statement, the Women’s Global Call for Climate Justice said on Friday that “while the agreement in Paris may represent a starting point for collective action…the terms are unclear and unjust, the ambition is too low, and the rights of people and the planet have not been secured.” The group is holding an Earth Day rally outside the UN to draw attention to how women and frontline communities are impacted by climate change.

Another group, Climate Mobilization, is holding a “die-in” in New York on Friday “to underscore the true impact of the Paris agreement: runaway climate change, state failure, and the deaths of billions.”

Citing the significant “unfinished business left from Paris,” Oxfam International executive director Winnie Byanyima on Friday said the provisions in the deal “are not enough to avoid a pathway towards a 3°C world and does not ensure the provision of adequate funding to ensure millions of vulnerable people can prepare for and respond to increasing climate chaos.”

In fact, she noted, “If all of today’s public climate adaptation finance were to be divided among the world’s 1.5 billion smallholder farmers in developing counties, they would get around $3 each a year to cope with climate change.”

In order to curtail dangerous climate change, according to FOEI:

To do so will require a paradigm shift, said Nnimmo Bassey, director of the HOME (Health of Mother Earth) Foundation.

“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the word ‘fossil’ is not as much as mentioned in the document.”
—Nnimmo Bassey, Health of Mother Earth Foundation

“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the word ‘fossil’ is not as much as mentioned in the document,” he pointed out. “It is shocking that although the burning of fossil fuels is known to be a major contributor to global warming, climate negotiations engage in platitudes rather than going to the core of the problem.”

“Scientists tell us that burning of fossil fuels would have to end by 2030 if there would be a chance of keeping temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels,” Bassey continued. “The signal we get from the silence on the fossils factor is that oil and coal companies can continue to extract profit while burning the planet.”

Signing is the first of a two-step process for countries to formally join the agreement—the next is ratification. The deal will come into force on the 30th day after the date on which at least 55 parties, representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gases, complete this process.

In the the U.S., Secretary of State John Kerry signed the agreement Friday, and then President Barack Obama will ratify it before he leaves office in December, a senior U.S. official told CBS News in a conference call this week.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that 15 countries would formally join the agreement immediately on Friday, many of them small island developing states—which the World Resources Institute notes “are poised to suffer the worst impacts of climate change even though they contributed the least to causing the problem.”

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