The EU and its Member States are among the nearly 190 parties to the Paris Agreement. The EU formally ratified the agreement on 5 October 2016, allowing it to enter into force on 4 November 2016. For the agreement to enter into force, at least 55 countries, which have escaped at least 55% of global emissions, had to deposit their instruments of ratification. The Paris Agreement is an ambitious, dynamic and universal agreement. It covers all countries and emissions and is designed to last. It is a monumental agreement. It consolidates international cooperation in the field of climate change. It offers a path forward. To address climate change, countries adopted the Paris Agreement at COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015. The agreement entered into force less than a year later.

The Kyoto Protocol, a pioneering environmental agreement adopted at COP3 in Japan in 1997, is the first time that nations have agreed on legal country-specific emission reduction targets. The protocol, which only entered into force in 2005, set binding emission reduction targets only for industrialized countries, arguing that they were responsible for most of the world`s high greenhouse gas emissions. The United States initially signed the agreement, but never ratified it; President George W. Bush argued that the deal would hurt the U.S. economy because developing countries like China and India would not be involved. Without the participation of these three countries, the effectiveness of the treaty has proven to be limited, as its objectives cover only a small fraction of total global emissions. The IPCC notes that climate change is limited only by “substantial and sustainable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” While one can discuss the benefits of using a single global temperature threshold to present dangerous climate change, general science believes that any increase in global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius would be an unacceptable risk, which could lead to mass extinctions, more severe droughts, and hurricanes and a nearby Arctic. Moreover, as the IPCC points out, while it is unclear to what extent global warming will cause “abrupt and irreversible changes” in the planet`s systems, the risk of crossing the threshold only increases with rising temperatures. At present, 197 countries – every nation on earth, the last signatory being war-torn Syria – have adopted the Paris Agreement. Of these, 179 have consolidated their climate proposals with formal approval, including the United States for now. The only major emitting countries that have not yet formally joined the deal are Russia, Turkey and Iran.

The UN continues to encourage all stakeholders to take action to reduce the effects of climate change. “The decision to leave the Paris Agreement was wrong when it was announced, and it`s still wrong today,” said Helen Mountford of the World Resources Institute. . . .