The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 195 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on December 12, 2015. It was created to strengthen the global response to climate change and to replace the earlier Kyoto Protocol, which was criticized for not including binding targets for all major emitters. The treaty entered into force on November 4, 2016.
The core problem it addresses is limiting global warming, with its long-term temperature goal, set out in Article 2, being to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
The agreement works through a "bottom-up" mechanism centered on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are national climate action plans that each country must submit and regularly report on. This system operates on a five-year cycle, known as the "ratcheting up" mechanism, where countries are expected to submit increasingly ambitious NDCs. Article 6 also establishes a framework for cooperative approaches, including a global carbon market. To track progress, the Global Stocktake assesses the collective effort every five years, with the first one concluding in 2023.
The Paris Agreement is an instrument under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also connects to the commitment by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance to support mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. While the core goals remain, the operational details, known as the Paris Rulebook, were finalized at COP26 in November 2021.