II.

Background and context

The conference was a step in a process that began with the Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, when nations first ratified the global agreement known as the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Kyoto Protocol was
ratified by nations in 1997 as they realized the need to further reduce emissions.
Through that protocol, developed nations were compelled by law to set emission
reduction goals. However, the agreement was widely regarded as being ineffective
because China and the United States, the top two carbon dioxide emitting nations in the
world, declined to sign on. Many U.S. government officials used the fact that China, a
developing nation, was not subject to the Kyoto Protocol to argue against U.S.
participation.

Delegates decided to prolong the Kyoto Protocol until 2020 during the 18th Conference
of the Parties (COP18), which took place in Doha, Qatar, in 2012. Furthermore, they
reaffirmed their commitment from COP17, which was held in Durban, South Africa, in
2011, to establish a new, comprehensive, legally binding climate treaty by 2015 that
would oblige all nations—including significant carbon emitters not adhering to the Kyoto
Protocol—to impose restrictions on and reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases.

The UN requested nations to submit plans describing how they aimed to lower
greenhouse gas emissions in the run-up to the Paris meeting. Technically speaking,
those programs were known as intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs).
185 nations had submitted their plans to restrict or reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions by 2025 or 2030 as of December 10, 2015. The United States declared in
2014 that it would reduce its emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2025. The
nation's Clean Power Plan aimed to minimize emissions from existing and future power
plants in order to contribute to the achievement of that objective. The goal for China,
which has the highest overall greenhouse gas emissions, is for carbon dioxide
emissions to peak "around 2030 and making best efforts to peak early." Chinese
officials also made an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60–
65 percent from the level in 2005.

The issues of alleviating poverty while lowering greenhouse gas emissions were
mentioned in India's INDC. India was home to 304 million people, or about 24 percent of
the world's population without access to electricity. However, the nation intended to
"reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33 to 35 percent by 2030" in comparison
to 2005 levels. By 2030, the nation also aimed to replace fossil fuels with renewable
energy sources for around 40% of its electric power needs. The INDC warned that the
implementation plans would not be feasible with domestic funding; it predicted that it
would take at least $2.5 trillion to execute climate change measures through 2030. The
Paris Agreement works on a five- year cycle of increasingly ambitious climate action
carried out by countries. Every five years, each country is expected to submit an
updated national climate action plan - known as Nationally Determined Contribution, or
NDC. In their NDCs, countries communicate actions they will take to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement. Countries also
communicate in the NDCs actions they will take to build resilience to adapt to the
impacts of rising temperatures.

The first "global stocktake" will evaluate the Paris Agreement goals in 2023. This
procedure will provide nations more motivation to adopt aggressive climate change
measures to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Paris Agreement
urges nations to develop and submit long-term strategies in order to better frame their
efforts toward the long-term objective. They are not required, in contrast to NDCs. The
Paris Rulebook, commonly referred to as the operational guidelines for the practical
implementation of the Paris Agreement, was agreed upon at the UN Climate Change
Conference (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, in December 2018, and was finalized at
COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021.

Nicaragua and Syria were the only two sovereign nations that had not ratified the
agreement as of early 2017, but President Trump changed U.S. climate policy that year.
On November 4, 2020, the nation formally left the pact as a result of Donald Trump's
election. However, the United States' absence was only temporary. On January 20,
2021, the first day of his term, Prez. On behalf of the United States, Joe Biden
reentered theaccord, clearing the path for the nation's official reinstatement in February
2021. 195 nations have signed the accord as of January 2021, and 190 had ratified it.

The progress made toward emission objectives since the agreement's implementation
has been uneven. Chinese authorities noted that they had fulfilled their 2020 goals in
2017 and that they were making significant progress in lowering greenhouse gas
emissions. In contrast, officials from the European Union declared in 2018 that all
member states had fallen behind in achieving their goals. Sweden, Portugal, and
France, however, had made the most progress, having attained, respectively, 77%, 66
percent, and 65 percent of their 2020 goals by 2018. U.S. development was less
certain.

Despite these reports, several global research institutions observed that carbon
emissions kept rising. The Global Carbon Project reported that carbon emissions
worldwide, which were virtually flat from 2014 to 2016, had climbed by 1.6 percent and
by 2.7 percent in 2017 and 2018, respectively. The Rhodium Group noted that U.S.
emissions had increased by 3.4 percent in 2018.
III. Analysis and Evaluation

The Paris Agreement (PA) is annexed to the COP Decision (FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1;

C2ES 2015), which summarizes the conference's results for both pre-2020 and long-
term policy. The two texts together make up the new international agreement. It has a
broad thematic scope and includes provisions on international cooperative mechanisms
(read: carbon trading), mitigation policy, transparency, reporting and review, and climate
finance, as well as weaker sections on adaptation, capacity building, technology
transfer, and forest policy. Additionally acknowledged in the PA's Preamble are the
rights of indigenous peoples, gender equality, women's empowerment, and
intergenerational equity.

Key elements include the global goal of keeping the temperature increase to "well below
2 C" and to "pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C" (Article 2), as well
as the desire to attain the global peaking of emissions "as soon as possible" (Article
4.1). Strongly worded language is used throughout the document to ensure progression
over time, including "All Parties are to undertake and communicate ambitious efforts"
(Art. 2) and "Each Party shall prepare, communicate, and maintain successive
nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve" (Art. 4.2), which are to be
revised every five years. Developed nations have a stronger responsibility and "should
continue taking the lead" with economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets, while
developing nations have a weaker duty and "should continue enhancing their mitigation
efforts, and are encouraged to move over time toward economy-wide emission
reduction or limitation targets in light of different national circumstances" (Art. 4.4).

While "other Parties are encouraged" to offer such assistance voluntarily, "developed
country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing countries" (Art. 9).
The PA also creates a market-based system for sustainable development and carbon
trading, an idea put out by Brazil and enthusiastically embraced by Japan and other
industrialized nations. The exact details of the mechanism's modalities will be worked
out later. In 2023 and every five years following that, a complete global stocktake will be
conducted with the aim of reviewing mitigation, adaptation, and financial measures. The
"facilitative" committee's work is "non-adversarial and non-punitive" (Article 15), making
the compliance measures ineffective.

Politically, the PA generally supports Northern developed nations because they

prevailed in the majority of decisive conflicts. The new climate agreement satisfies all
important US objectives and is based on a "pledge and review" framework for global
climate governance that Japan suggested in the early 1990s (Andresen 2015). The
African Group and other Least Developed Countries are treated the least fairly by the
pact. It omits any mention of their unique circumstances, is deficient in terms of
international adaptation policy elements, and bars any foreseeable culpability and
compensation claims.

Strengths of the agreement include international accountability and transparency,

regular and progressive development of national policy, and principled duties to act. On
the long-term global objective, the adaptation strategy, compensation for loss and
damage, and technology transfer, the PA performs worse. Importantly, the PA lacks
specificity regarding the global division of labor for emission reduction. A major obstacle
in international talks has been the division of responsibility (Gupta 2012). After decades
of negotiations, governments tackled the problem of how to divide up the work of
battling climate change in an unexpected way: by largely avoiding it. It is unclear exactly
how national mitigation policy "contributions" relate to the objectives of international
policy.

The complexity and experimental nature of the PA makes its evaluation difficult and has
already raised controversy. In a current debate among international lawyers on the
character of the PA, insider legal scholars who participate in the UNFCCC negotiations
regard the PA as a legally binding treaty that creates obligations, with a complex mix of
mandatory and voluntary provisions (Bodansky 2016; Rajamani 2016). Like any
international treaty, the PA depends on ratification and entry into force. A double
threshold for entry into force mirrors the Kyoto Protocol formula: The agreement would
become operational when at least 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of
global emissions ratified. Furthermore, important elements remain to be finalized in
negotiations over the next years that may rectify some current weaknesses.

Resources:

Hermwille, L., Obergassel, W., Ott, H. E., & Beuermann, C. (2017). UNFCCC before
and after Paris – what’s necessary for an effective climate regime? Climate Policy,
17(2), 150–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2015.1115231

United Nations. (n.d.). The Paris Agreement | United

Nations. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/paris-agreement

What is the history of the Paris Agreement (2015)? - Ask DAG! (n.d.).
https://ask.un.org/faq/120272

Maizland, L. (2022, November 4). Global Climate Agreements: Successes and Failures.
Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/paris-global-climate-
change-agreements

Dimitrov, R. S. (2016). The Paris Agreement on Climate Change: Behind Closed Doors.
Global Environmental Politics, 16(3), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00361

What is the history of the Paris Agreement (2015)? - Ask DAG! (n.d.).
https://ask.un.org/faq/120272

Bodansky, D. (2016). The Paris Climate Change Agreement: A New Hope? American
Journal of International Law, 110(2), 288–319.
https://doi.org/10.5305/amerjintelaw.110.2.0288

Kok, M. R., & De Coninck, H. (2007). Widening the scope of policies to address climate
change: directions for mainstreaming. Environmental Science & Policy, 10(7–8), 587–
599. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2007.07.003

HeinOnline. (2021, March 8). About | HeinOnline.

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nyuev27&div=9&id=&pa
ge=

Seddon, N., Chausson, A., Santos, R., Girardin, C. a. J., Turkelboom, F., & Turner, B.
(2020). Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change
and other global challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
375(1794), 20190120. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0120