Paris Climate Agreement
The Paris Agreement was adopted by 196 parties on 12 December 2015 at the twenty-first UN climate conference, and is the first climate treaty to which essentially every country is a signatory. Its central commitment is to hold the rise in global average temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C — the lower figure inserted at the insistence of small island states for which the difference is existential. Its design was the response to the failure of Kyoto and of Copenhagen in 2009. Rather than negotiating binding national targets, which the United States would never ratify, Paris asks each country to set its own nationally determined contribution, to report progress transparently, and to return every five years with a stronger pledge. The obligations are procedural and binding; the targets themselves are not. Wealthy countries reaffirmed a commitment to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries, a figure first promised in 2009 and reached, on contested accounting, only around 2022. The pledges made in 2015 implied roughly 3°C of warming. Subsequent rounds have brought the projection down to somewhere near 2.5 to 2.9°C, which is progress and not compliance. The United States withdrew under Donald Trump in 2020, rejoined under Joe Biden in 2021, and withdrew again in 2025. Emissions have continued to rise, and 2023 and 2024 were the warmest years on record. The agreement's real achievement was universality and a mechanism for ratcheting, not the pledges themselves. Renewable deployment has since exceeded almost every forecast made in 2015, largely on cost.
- Year: 2015 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
