Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/10/climate-change-action/679732/

The 2015 Paris Agreement was a landmark, but countries need to raise their ambition again to complete the transition away from fossil fuels.

On December 12, 2015, the 195 country parties to the United Nations’ climate body adopted the Paris Agreement on climate change. The accord was historic, sending a message to governments, boardrooms, clean-tech innovators, civil society, and citizens that the leaders of the world had finally come together to combat climate change.

The agreement was groundbreaking in many respects. It cast aside the old paradigm in which climate obligations applied only to developed countries. It articulated strong goals to limit global temperature and greenhouse-gas emissions. It required countries to submit nationally determined targets for reducing emissions, and to do this every five years, with each new target stronger than the previous one. It established a second five-year cycle for a “global stocktake” to see how the world is doing in the aggregate on climate change. It set up a transparency system for countries to report on their progress and for those reports to be reviewed by international experts. And it adopted a hybrid legal arrangement, with legally binding procedural rules complementing the nonbinding emission targets.