Paris Agreement: global framework to limit climate change
The Paris Agreement is a global climate pact under the UNFCCC that seeks to limit warming well below 2°C, strengthen adaptation and mobilize climate finance through nationally determined contributions and periodic review.
The Paris Agreement is an international treaty under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that sets a shared long‑term aim to curb human‑caused climate change. Adopted at the UN climate conference in Paris, the agreement calls for holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre‑industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. It also establishes a structure for countries to plan, report and strengthen their emissions reductions and resilience efforts over time.
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Key features
- Nationally determined contributions (NDCs): Each country submits its own climate commitment describing mitigation and adaptation actions and is expected to update these periodically to increase ambition.
- Transparency and accountability: A common reporting and review system aims to track progress and build trust among parties.
- Global stocktake: Every five years a collective assessment reviews progress toward the long‑term goals and informs stronger future NDCs.
- Climate finance and support: Developed and other parties are encouraged to mobilize financial resources, technology transfer and capacity building to help vulnerable countries adapt and reduce emissions.
- Adaptation, loss and damage: The agreement recognizes the need for adaptation planning and addresses harms that arise from climate impacts (adaptation and resilience).
Legally, the Paris Agreement blends binding procedural commitments (for example, to prepare and report NDCs and participate in the transparency framework) with non‑binding national targets for emissions reductions. It relies on a ‘‘ratchet mechanism’’: parties are expected to submit progressively more ambitious NDCs in successive cycles so that collective ambition can rise over time. The agreement also creates mechanisms for voluntary cooperation between countries, including provisions to facilitate international carbon‑market approaches.
History and status
The accord was negotiated at the UN climate conference held in Paris and adopted in December 2015; it was opened for signature in 2016 and entered into force when a sufficient number of parties ratified it later that year. The Paris Agreement secured unusually broad participation: virtually every country in the world has become a party or signaled intention to join, making it the central multilateral framework for global climate policy. The agreement builds on earlier UNFCCC work while shifting emphasis to nationally determined action and regular global review.
Since its adoption, countries have used the Paris framework to update domestic laws, set net‑zero targets, design carbon pricing or emissions trading systems, and direct public and private finance toward clean energy, efficiency and adaptation measures. Article 6, which addresses international cooperation and carbon markets, has been the focus of detailed rulemaking to enable cross‑border emissions trading and crediting.
Critics note that the agreement does not prescribe uniform binding emissions limits and that current national pledges are collectively inadequate to guarantee the 1.5°C or even the well‑below‑2°C outcome. Supporters argue it provides a durable diplomatic and technical architecture—periodic transparency, finance commitments and a five‑year review—that can drive increasing ambition and coordinated action. The Paris Agreement remains the primary global instrument guiding national policy, international finance flows and corporate climate commitments as the world seeks to manage risks from a changing climate. See also the original negotiations in Paris for historical context.
Ratification and entry into force
During the UN Climate Change Conference in 2011, the so-called Durban Platform (and the ad hoc working group for the Durban Platform for deepening action) was established with the aim of negotiating a legal instrument that would then set out climate action from 2020.
The agreement was adopted on 12 December 2015 at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. In April 2016, 175 countries, including the United States, China and Germany, signed the agreement. By early September 2016, the United States had adopted the treaty and the People's Republic of China had ratified it, a day before the G-20 summit in China. The two are the countries with the largest greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to that, a number of small states and many island nations had already completed the ratification process. On September 21 - the International Day of Peace - 31 more countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates, joined. This meant that 60 states had joined, accounting for around 48% of emissions. In Germany, the Bundestag and Bundesrat passed ratification at the end of September 2016; formal completion of ratification by handing over the documents to the UN took place on 5 October 2016. On 2 October 2016, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, India, the third largest producer of greenhouse gases, ratified the agreement, bringing the number of states that have ratified, accepted, approved or acceded to to 62, accounting for 51.89 per cent of emissions.
On 5 October 2016, the European Union, Canada and Nepal ratified the treaty. As a result, 71 countries responsible for around 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions had joined the agreement at that time, meeting the two thresholds of 55% of emissions and 55 countries. Therefore, the agreement was able to enter into force on 4 November 2016, 30 days after the two thresholds were exceeded.
As of 17 November 2016, when the UK joined, a total of 111 countries had ratified the agreement.
As of May 8, 2017, with Georgia's ratification, there were 145 states, representing a total of 82.95 percent of global emissions.
After the G20 summit in Hamburg in 2017, Turkish President Erdoğan questioned his country's ratification of the agreement. It should not be passed in parliament as long as the "promises made to Turkey are not fulfilled".
Switzerland ratified the agreement on 6 October 2017, and it entered into force on 5 November 2017.
As of May 13, 2018, 176 states had ratified the agreement.
Announced, completed and withdrawn resignations
USA
On 1 June 2017, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The treaty was very unfair to the US. Therefore, he wanted to conduct new negotiations. He had been elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris. Already a day earlier it became known that a committee with the cooperation of the then EPA head Scott Pruitt should coordinate the further steps for the withdrawal. During the 2016 election campaign, Trump had announced the withdrawal of the USA from the agreement. Trump also declared in the speech that the US would "as of today" stop implementing all commitments made at the Paris meeting, including payments to the Green Climate Fund.
The withdrawal process was initiated on November 4, 2019.
The Trump administration was split on the issue of withdrawal. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, as well as the then advisors Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller were considered the most vehement supporters of a withdrawal. Trump himself had claimed that man-made climate change was invented by China to hurt American factories economically. Those in favor of staying in the agreement were said to be then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. In opinion polls, 71% of Americans as well as 57% of Republicans said the U.S. should remain in the agreement. Many of the largest U.S. companies, including oil and coal companies, also supported staying in the agreement. The fossil fuel industry was split on the decision, reflecting the two basic strategies for dealing with global warming: One part of the industry continues to try to level the research findings by cherry-picking and launching attacks on the UN processes, while another part accepts the research findings and instead tries to convince policymakers of "clean coal" and energy efficiency, thus gaining political support for new "low emissions" coal plants. By contrast, a group of 22 Republican senators who have collectively received more than $10 million from the fossil fuel industry over the past five years had lobbied for termination. Among them were Mitch McConnell (b. 1942), James Inhofe (b. 1934), Rand Paul (b. 1963) and Texan Ted Cruz.
Trump's withdrawal decision has been criticized by senior politicians and heads of very large companies around the world. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and EU Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete, among others, expressed regret at the decision. Former U.S. President Barack Obama criticized Trump's administration for joining "a small handful of nations in denying the future." The U.S.Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed outrage, stressing that the decision would cause harm not only to the U.S. but to the entire world, and especially to the poorest communities. Even before Trump's official announcement that he would withdraw from the agreement, many countries that are important in terms of climate policy, such as the People's Republic of China, India, France and Canada, had declared that they would stick to the agreement regardless of Trump's decision.
A Guardian commentator wrote that the decision was the biggest success of the climate denial industry to date. Several of its key figures, such as Myron Ebell, had even received invitations to speak at the White House Rose Garden. It is now time to take this denial industry seriously, he said. The New York Times called the withdrawal declaration "disgraceful" in an editorial and wrote that the only clear winners were "hardcore climate deniers" like Scott Pruitt and Stephen Bannon and fossil fuel industry interest groups. Only future generations will be able to gauge the full extent of Trump's "incredibly short-sighted approach to climate change," he added. The withdrawal was a "terrible decision" that represented "in big neon letters" that Trump knew nothing about, or cared little about, climate science, environmental damage, and resulting problems; that he was unaware that the U.S. was historically the largest producer of carbon dioxide and therefore had a special obligation; that he did not realize what further diplomatic damage the decision would entail; that his dereliction of official duty could tempt more countries to withdraw from the agreement or reduce their commitments. Perhaps most astonishing of all, however, he said that as the astute businessman he portrayed himself to be, he appeared to be blind to the damage his decision to withdraw would have on American economic interests.
Climate change researcher Benjamin D. Santer called Trump's withdrawal speech an "astonishing concentrate of some of the worst arguments of climate confusionists and fossil fuel lobbyists," and that was putting it politely. According to media fact checks, nearly all of the sentences in Trump's withdrawal statement were substantively inaccurate and contained misrepresentations or distortions.
Three U.S. state governors announced on June 1, 2017, that they are forming an alliance of states to remain committed to the Paris Agreement. The governors are Jay Inslee for Washington State, Andrew Cuomo for New York State, and Jerry Brown for California. The next day, six governors announced that their respective states would join the alliance: Dannel Malloy (Connecticut), Charlie Baker (Massachusetts), Phil Scott (Vermont), Gina Raimondo (Rhode Island), Kate Brown (Oregon) and David Ige (Hawaii). Still in June, the United States Climate Alliance was joined by the states of Governors Terry McAuliffe (Virginia), Mark Dayton (Minnesota), and John C. Carney Jr. (Delaware), as well as Puerto Rico, an outlying U.S. territory, through its Governor Ricky Rosselló. In July, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper announced the state's entry.
Representatives from several U.S. cities, states, and businesses announced their commitment to the United Nations to remain committed to the Paris Agreement.
On November 4, 2020, the U.S. officially withdrew from the climate agreement.
The 46th President of the United States Joe Biden (Democratic Party) signed a decree on his first day in office on January 20, 2021, as announced in advance, that he would rejoin the global climate agreement. It became legally effective 30 days later. Thus, the United States has been a member again since 19 February 2021.
Brazil
Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected Brazil's new president at the end of October 2018, also announced his country's possible withdrawal from the global climate agreement in his campaign platform.
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AlegsaOnline.com Paris Agreement: global framework to limit climate change Leandro Alegsa
URL: https://en.alegsaonline.com/art/74659