"The failure to implement the Paris agreement threatens with emergence of up to 250 million climate refugees by 2050," Juncker said at the European Parliament meeting in Brussels.
On June 1, US President Donald Trump announced that his country would be pulling out of the Paris climate accord, arguing that the agreement had the potential to hurt the US economy and affect national job growth while unfairly benefiting other nations. However, the president expressed his readiness to renegotiate the deal under terms that would be fair to the United States.
Juncker said that the European Union would not renegotiate the deal and called on all involved parties for action.
The Paris climate accord, created within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and championed by former US President Barack Obama, has been signed by 195 parties and ratified by 148.
The agreement aims at keeping the increase in average global temperature at below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Each party to the deal has agreed to cut their emissions, and is expected to produce its own plan for achieving these goals, determine the time line for the implementation of said goals and then report on its progress.
