(Bloomberg) — The world's nations took the boldest steps yet to stem climate change, adopting an historic package of measures to limit fossil-fuel pollution and establish a mechanism to step up the reductions for decades.

After two weeks of intense negotiations overseen by the United Nations, envoys from 195 nations in Paris on Saturday endorsed a program that also set an ambitious goal to curb temperature increases and set up ways to measure and verify emissions everywhere.

French President Francois Hollande hailed the deal as the "first universal agreement in the history of climate negotiations" and "a major leap for mankind."  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent days in Paris negotiating, said it the deal sends "a critical message to the global marketplace." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called it a "monumental triumph."

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