Kerry and Fabius visit China to campaign for strong Paris climate deal

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in Beijing on Saturday to campaign for a strong global climate deal ahead of the COP21 UN conference in Paris in December.

At a press conference in China’s capital, Fabius (pictured right) said: "Such a deal is extremely important, but it is also extremely complicated."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured left) was also in Beijing and made a joint announcement with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on plans to increase cooperation on addressing climate change.

Kerry said that the U.S. and China had the greatest responsibility to take action as they were the biggest global greenhouse gas emitters.

At the COP20 summit in December last year, 195 states agreed on the basic principles for a climate deal in Lima, but many issues are still to be agreed on.

The countries agreed to make efforts to limit global warming to no more than 2°C, after research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found this to be a significantly dangerous level of warming.

Preliminary discussions are scheduled to take place in Berlin on Monday as part of the so-called Petersberg dialogue in preparation for the Paris negotiations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are due to give speeches on Tuesday.

On Saturday Merkel said "It is very important to prepare everyone so that national energy goals are defined as soon as possible."

Merkel also called for the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS), to become a global scheme saying: "This instrument would of course be particularly effective if we could introduce it beyond Europe because then we'd have the same general framework around the world…And that would enable us to expand the certificate trading to further areas, even in Europe."