Nearly Every Nation Adopts the Paris Climate Agreement

On 12 December 2015, the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the European Union, reached a consensus near Paris, adopting the Paris Agreement. The treaty was designed to bolster the international response to climate change by addressing mitigation, adaptation, and finance. Its central long-term benchmark set an objective to keep the rise in global surface temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while urging governments to pursue efforts limiting the rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius over multi-decade averages.

Negotiated during the twenty-first Conference of the Parties, known as COP21, the agreement emerged from years of difficult diplomacy following the collapse of talks in Copenhagen in 2009. The resulting structure departed significantly from its predecessor, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. While Kyoto imposed legally binding reduction targets on a specific group of industrialized states, the Paris pact instituted a bottom-up framework. Under this system, individual countries determine, plan, and submit their own voluntary emission reduction targets, designated as nationally determined contributions, every five years.