Paris Agreement is an international treaty designed to combat global warming. Global warming is an increase in the average temperature of Earth’s surface since the late 1800’s. The goal of the Paris Agreement is to keep global temperatures well within 3.6 °F (2.0 °C) of their levels at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and to pursue efforts to keep the temperature increase below 2.7 °F (1.5 °C).
The Paris Agreement requires that each country strengthen its climate regulations as much as it is able. Each country must also provide regular reports on its carbon emissions and emission targets. The agreement also calls for a global assessment every five years to determine if goals are being met. Countries that sign the agreement are not legally required to meet any particular target. Instead, the authors of the treaty hope that countries with higher greenhouse gas output will feel compelled to lower their emissions, since each country’s progress is publicly reported.
The Paris Agreement serves as an addition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty adopted in 1992 to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. The agreement was devised to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which effectively expired in 2012. Parties to the protocol discussed extending it at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009, in Cancún, Mexico, in 2010, and in Durban, South Africa, in 2011. But the discussions, which focused on setting mandatory emissions reductions for each country, failed to produce an extension or an alternative to the protocol. At the 2015 conference, in Paris, delegates developed a compromise in which countries agreed to lower their emissions voluntarily. Almost every country in the world—including the two heaviest polluters, China and the United States—signed the agreement. It entered into force Nov. 4, 2016, after more than 55 of the countries representing more than 55 percent of global carbon emissions had ratified (legally approved) it. By the end of 2017, every country in the world had signed the Paris Agreement.
Also in 2017, President Donald J. Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The announcement was widely criticized by environmentalists and world leaders for weakening global efforts to combat climate change. The United States formally withdrew on Nov. 4, 2020. Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election. On Jan. 20, 2021, his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order to return the United States to the agreement. The decision went into effect on February 19.
In late 2021, nearly 200 countries signed the Glasgow Climate Pact, a new climate change agreement. After the Paris Agreement was ratified, scientists proved that a 2.7 °F (1.5 °C) increase in global temperature would be significantly less destructive to the planet than a 3.6 °F (2.0 °C) increase. In the Glasgow Climate Pact, countries agreed to work hard to meet the 2.7 °F (1.5 °C) target. However, many scientists say that the guidelines set by the Paris Agreement and the Glasgow Climate Pact are not strict enough to meet these goals. To keep the average global temperature increase below 3.6 °F (2.0 °C), countries need to drastically reduce their carbon emissions as soon as possible.
