The Paris Agreement

DEC 12 2015 · 12:00

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius brings down the gavel as 196 parties approve the Paris Agreement at COP21, Le Bourget, 12 December 2015. Place: COP21, Le Bourget, Paris Figures: Laurent Fabius, COP21 President · Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC Executive Secretary · Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General · François Hollande, French President · the 196 parties (195 states plus the European Union) The Hammer At 7:25 p.m. on 12 December 2015, Laurent Fabius brings down a small green gavel, fashioned for the occasion, on the table of the plenary at Le Bourget. 196 parties have adopted the Paris Agreement: each state submits a nationally determined contribution toward holding warming well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. The text is twenty-seven pages. Two decades of failed top-down negotiations (Kyoto, Copenhagen) had insisted on legally binding emissions targets; Paris abandons that structure in exchange for universal participation. The compromise of the era: planetary problem, Westphalian instruments. Each sovereign sets its own contribution. There is no binding enforcement and no penalty for non-achievement. The mechanism is a ratchet: every five years, each party submits a new NDC that will represent a progression. Peer review and transparency replace legal compulsion. The wager is that publicly committed targets, in a system where everyone can see who is missing them, will outperform mandatory targets that the largest emitters would never have signed. What the Agreement Settles, and What It Cannot Trump notifies withdrawal in 2017 (effective 4 November 2020, one day after the election that returns him to opposition). Biden rejoins in 2021. Trump notifies again in 2025. The on-off-on pattern itself becomes part of the test: the agreement is designed to survive any single party's exit because participation, not compliance, is its load-bearing feature. By 2025 global emissions are still rising, but the rate of increase has slowed and renewable deployment exceeds the IEA's most optimistic 2015 projections. Whether the agreement is sufficient is the live question of the next two decades. The 1.5 °C threshold is on track to be breached on the multi-year average by the early 2030s. The instruments themselves remain Westphalian: 196 sovereign decisions, aggregated. Hope and Ludlow's argument that planetary-scale collective-action problems may exceed the capacity of the sovereign-state system to solve them is, on the climate question, the central wager of this folio. The wager has not yet resolved. Video: UNFCCC recording of Laurent Fabius bringing down the green gavel at Le Bourget on the evening of 12 December 2015, signalling the adoption of the Paris Agreement.