The year 2015 will go down in history as the hottest on record. Bizarre weather continues to play itself out in front of our eyes. In the US, intense tornadoes and snowstorms in Texas, as well as floods in the north of the UK, point to weather patterns going haywire. Down here, we are having one of the driest and hottest summers ever.

Of course, climate change denialists will say all this is due to the natural cycle of El Niño, but even this El Niño is no ordinary El Niño. It has been dumping heat into the atmosphere like never before.

Most scientists attribute unpredictable weather patterns to the global warming effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) spewed into the atmosphere. This correlation between a CO2 increase and global warming is no longer disputable. We may dispute how this manifests itself in relation to climate variability and what may be the best ways to bring down carbon emissions, but the relation between increased CO2 and warming is now conclusive.

The recent Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting has been lauded as being better than any other international climate change meeting. There are many reasons for this optimism, which will be explored below, but this optimism should be tempered with some caution.

Firstly, a coalition of 100 developing countries have managed to push for the global agreement that a 1.5 °C target is better than a 2 °C target, as global efforts to reduce greenhouses gases have to be ramped up. Experts argue this lower threshold is safer than a higher threshold. It also helps to give greater priority to adaptation issues rather than just mitigation.

Glaringly absent from the coalition are the emerging developing country economies of South Africa, Brazil, China and India. They share the following characteristics: they are no pushovers as champions of developing country interests, they are emerging economies that could shift the world’s economic centre of gravity, and their emissions going forward could be significant.

An unintended consequence of the hype around the coalition may be to set emerging economies up as the spoilers. South Africa’s absence from the coalition need not be read as a lack of commitment to a fair, ambitious and binding deal. It is hoped the country will play a greater role in ensuring global collective action between developed and developing countries has a unified approach to a binding agreement.

Secondly, countries’ INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) tabled before the Paris conference have now been accepted as INDCs, but we know these are inadequate and put us on a path to 2.7 °C at the most optimistic. The agreement, at least, establishes a five-year cycle for evaluating mitigation efforts, with the principle that countries must improve each time, but this kicks in only after 2020. This is a snag because pre-2020-phase countries may end up doing as little as possible to change the status quo.

Thirdly, countries are tasked to develop long-term low carbon emission strategies for submission by 2020. The benefit of this is that it will tell a story of the extent to which countries, especially emerging and developing countries, can either do this by themselves or will need international assistance.

They will also bring economic realism to the current INDCs that different countries submitted prior to the Paris conference for review. The voluntary commitments submitted by the participating countries show that, so far, what States have put on the table for emission reductions is inadequate to deal with the below 2 °C stretch target the Paris conference set.

Based on the INDCs submitted by 155 countries accounting for over 90% of current greenhouse-gas emissions, independent experts have identified an ambition gap of 17 gigatons, or 55%, of the total mitigation of 30.8 gigatons that is required by 2030 for a 66% chance of remaining below the 2 °C warming limit. If we make an assessment on a fair share basis, then developed economies need to do much more. They are not committing to more effort.

South Africa has accounted for about 1% of global emissions since 1850 and so does have a responsibility. Our INDC is rated ‘inadequate’ in terms of doing its fair share of mitigation. This rating is due to two aspects of the INDC: it offers no unconditional mitigation action and allows South Africa a far too high upper limit to its emissions.

This is one of the reasons why the pre-2020 call for a more morally obliging pledge-and-review system should have been agreed on before the implementation of a legally binding agreement takes place from 2020, as it allows us to assess what more scope there is to improve on the global emission reduction ambition. This is one of the weaknesses of the current COP agreement, under which formal stock taking of the INDC pledges will only take place by 2023. This is very problematic, as we may find ourselves on the back foot if countries have backtracked in the intervening period.

Linking formal low carbon plans with pledges made in country INDC submissions will go some way towards assessing how much is real and whether the rest is fiction.

While the Paris agreement is widely seen as a pact that enshrines the principles of a bottom-up approach – which means countries choose the best way to reduce emissions rather than having a target imposed on them – it still has many aspects that need to be strengthened. The next round of climate negotiations will involve tightening the loose ends and giving operational teeth to what the Paris meeting means by ‘legally binding’.