Valletta: French President Francois Hollande on Thursday stood by the need for a “binding” agreement at an upcoming world climate summit starting in Paris at the end of the month.

Hollande touched on the nature of the accord after US Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out that the proposed deal would not include greenhouse-gas curbs backed by tough legal provisions of the kind agreed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

“If there is not a binding accord, there will not be an accord,” Hollande said at an EU-Africa summit in Malta after being asked about Kerry’s remarks.

Kerry, interviewed by the Financial Times earlier this week, had said: “It’s definitively not going to be a treaty... They’re not going to be legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto or something.”

The November 30-December 11 conference gathers members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Launched at summit level, it aims to secure a post-2020 deal to stave off potentially catastrophic levels of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The objective of the talks is to frame a deal that will prevent Earth from warming by more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial levels.

Countries most at risk — including low-lying small island states and poor nations in Africa — have called for capping the rise in temperatures to 1.5 C, saying anything less would result in catastrophic impacts.

The legal nature of the agreement is one of several highly complex issues that must be addressed in Paris.

The draft blueprint does not include Kyoto’s legally-binding compliance and surveillance measures as it embraces a voluntary approach to greenhouse-gas curbs.

Critics of this say the deal will fail to have teeth, but supporters of it say that the accord, if endorsed by all parties, will still be politically “binding,” and thus effective.