The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international treaty adopted in 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It entered into force on March 21, 1994, and has near-universal membership with 198 Parties. The Convention was created to combat "dangerous human interference with the climate system" by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
The UNFCCC functions as a framework, not setting binding emission reduction targets itself, but providing the foundation for subsequent agreements. A key mechanism is the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" (CBDR), which asserts that all countries share responsibility for addressing climate change, but developed countries should take the lead due to their greater historical emissions. The Convention's decision-making body is the annual Conference of the Parties (COP), which first met in 1995. Article 11 of the Convention contains key provisions for the Financial Mechanism (FM), which includes the Green Climate Fund (GCF), to support developing countries' climate efforts.
The UNFCCC is the parent treaty for two major international agreements: the Kyoto Protocol (adopted in 1997, entered into force in 2005), which set binding emission targets for developed countries, and the Paris Agreement (adopted in 2015, entered into force in 2016). The Paris Agreement effectively replaced the Kyoto Protocol's framework by requiring all Parties to submit and regularly update their voluntary, non-binding Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), aiming to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C and pursuing 1.5°C. The core structure of the UNFCCC remains the same, but its work now focuses on implementing the Paris Agreement, which introduced new mechanisms like the Global Stocktake (Article 14) to assess collective progress every five years.