UN hopes Trump will 'reconsider' exit from Paris deal: climate chief

MEXICO CITY (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The United Nations remains hopeful that U.S. President Donald Trump will change his mind on withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, and will stay in the 2015 global deal, the U.N. climate chief said.

Trump announced last year his decision to pull his country out of the Paris accord, arguing that sticking with it would cost the United States trillions of dollars in lost jobs and damage to its industries - but he left the door open to renegotiating the pact.

“We still maintain hope that there could be a reconsideration,” said Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“In the meantime, they have been participating in the negotiations and deliberations,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

U.N. rules mean the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter cannot leave the Paris climate deal until November 2020. Most governments do not want to reopen discussions on its terms.

Espinosa said the Paris Agreement had now been ratified by 175 nations.

The climate deal set a goal of keeping the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5 degrees. The world has already warmed by about 1 degree.