Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement is an international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 parties at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference near Paris, France, and opened for signature in 2016. It commits its parties to efforts to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees, and covers climate change mitigation, adaptation to its effects, and finance to help developing countries meet these goals. Unlike its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, the agreement does not set binding emissions targets for individual countries, relying instead on each party's own nationally determined contributions, reviewed and strengthened on a five-year cycle. As of the mid-2020s nearly every member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change had ratified the agreement, though the United States withdrew from it in 2020, rejoined in 2021, and withdrew again in 2026, underscoring the agreement's continued dependence on sustained political commitment from its largest emitters.