The Paris Agreement is an international treaty on climate change that was adopted in 2015 by 196 parties at the United Nations Climate Change Conference near Paris, France. The agreement covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance, and is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. The central aim of the Paris Agreement is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Paris Agreement requires all countries to set emissions-reduction pledges, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), with the goals of preventing the global average temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The agreement includes commitments from all major emitting countries to cut their climate pollution and to strengthen those commitments over time. The pact provides a pathway for developed nations to assist developing nations in their climate mitigation and adaptation efforts, and it creates a framework for the transparent monitoring, reporting, and ratcheting up of countries’ individual and collective climate goals. The Paris Agreement still emphasizes the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility and Respective Capabilities—the acknowledgement that different nations have different capacities and duties to climate action—but it does not provide a specific division between developed and developing nations. The Paris Agreement works on a five-year cycle of increasingly ambitious climate action carried out by countries.
