The Paris Agreement

In short: The Paris Agreement is an international treaty in which almost every country in the world commits to limiting global warming. It was adopted in December 2015 at the UN climate conference in Paris and entered into force in November 2016.

In more detail: Unlike earlier agreements, it does not set fixed reduction amounts for individual countries from above. Instead, each country submits its own climate targets, which are meant to be reviewed and strengthened regularly.

In detail

• Temperature goal: Warming is to be held well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and efforts are to be made to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
• Why 1.5 degrees: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown that many risks, such as heat extremes, sea-level rise and loss of species, are considerably greater at 2 degrees than at 1.5 degrees.
• National contributions: Each country submits so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and is expected to update them roughly every five years and make them more ambitious.
• Net zero: In the second half of the century, a balance is to be reached between greenhouse gases emitted and those removed again.
• Global stocktake: At regular intervals the world’s overall progress is assessed; the first stocktake was completed in 2023.
• Adaptation and finance: The agreement also covers adapting to the impacts of climate change and support for poorer countries from industrialised nations.
• How binding it is: What is binding above all are the procedures, that is submitting targets, reporting on them and reviewing them; each country decides the level of its own targets.
• Withdrawals: The USA withdrew under President Trump, returned in 2021 and announced its withdrawal again in 2025; the other parties remained in the agreement.
• State of implementation: According to the UN and the IPCC, the measures announced so far are not yet enough to reliably meet the agreement’s goals (klimawandel-grundlagen, treibhauseffekt, erneuerbare-energien-ueberblick).