Ten Years On, the Paris Agreement Remains Far From Its Climate Goals
The Paris Agreement, adopted by 196 parties at COP21 on December 12, 2015, entered into force on November 4, 2016. Its central aim is to hold global warming well below 2C above preindustrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5C. Today, 194 parties—193 countries and the European Union—belong to the legally binding treaty. Rather than imposing identical cuts, it asks governments to set national targets, known as nationally determined contributions, and strengthen them every five years.
The agreement has helped produce tougher climate policies and a rapid expansion of clean energy, but its results remain far short of what is required. The planet was more than 1.5C warmer than preindustrial levels across the full year in 2024. The years 2023, 2024 and 2025 were the three hottest on record and the first three-year period to average above 1.5C. Long-term warming is about 1.4C, and scientists expect it to pass 1.5C around the end of this decade. The UN Environment Programme has said that avoiding any overshoot is no longer possible.
There has been progress: projections based on existing policies have fallen from about 3.6C of warming by 2100 in 2015 to roughly 2.6C today. Yet progress has stalled since 2021, while global emissions are 9 percent higher than in 2016. China, the United States and India produce more than half of annual emissions; China remains the largest emitter, while India and Indonesia are still rising. Germany, Japan and the US have reduced emissions, but those cuts have been outweighed by growth elsewhere. The US has also joined and left the agreement twice, most recently in January 2025.
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