On this day 10 years ago, countries from around the world met in France to approve a monumental deal for lowering the pollution that’s causing climate change.
The Paris Agreement — the first binding international pact to tackle runaway temperatures — showed that the world was finally serious about addressing the damaging effects from rising seas, intensifying storms and searing heat waves. It put a major environmental problem on the radar of humanity.
“This agreement recognizes that we are going to have to begin to change the way we power our planet,” said then-secretary of State John Kerry.
But if the agreement identified the dangers, it has not resulted in lasting action to solve them — at least, not yet.
A decade later, carbon emissions are still rising, fossil fuel use is increasing and the world has experienced its hottest years in recorded history.
No one expected the agreement to be perfect. Countries are bound to submit progressively stronger carbon-cutting plans every five years, but are not legally required to meet them — due in large part to resistance from the U.S. under President Barack Obama. But Paris has elevated climate change in capitals, boardrooms and dining rooms, while transforming industries that are now driving the world into a clean energy future.
“It has drawn a line in the sand,” Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate ambassador and an architect of the agreement, told reporters this week. “There is a before [Paris,] and after.”
Clean technologies for powering homes, cars and businesses have expanded exponentially in the past 10 years — and gotten much cheaper.
Yet the COP30 climate talks last month showed that a fractured and divided world is unable to find consensus on phasing out fossil fuels — the main source of rising temperatures — a decade after nations signed an agreement to do just that. Nevertheless, Paris remains the North Star for international action on climate change. Just one country, though not an insignificant one, has quit the agreement: the U.S.
“Paris is the mother ship,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s climate envoy. “It is the context into which all the other coalitions of the willing are organizing themselves.”
Here’s a look at where the world stands since the Paris Agreement was approved exactly 10 years ago.
Emissions are still rising
The agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era, while aiming for 1.5 degrees.
But carbon pollution from fossil fuels reached a record 38.1 billion tonnes this year, according to the Global Carbon Project, which publishes an annual assessment of the world’s carbon budget. While many countries are cutting pollution from their energy systems, it’s not enough to offset rapid growth in global energy demand, the analysis found.
That means achieving the ambitious 1.5-degree goal is gone, said Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter who led the analysis.
Not all is lost. A growing number of countries — 35 at last count — are seeing emissions decline even as their economies grow, roughly double the number 10 years ago.
And growth in global emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use has slowed since 2015, from around 1.9 percent a year on average to 0.3 percent.
“The issue is it’s been 10 years after Paris and we’re still showing slow progress,” Friedlingstein said.
Renewables are booming
Solar and wind power have skyrocketed since 2015. Over the first six months of this year, renewables overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity, and costs have continued to decline for technologies like solar panels and batteries for storage, thanks overwhelmingly to China.
Solar is the fastest-growing source of power ever and is doubling every three years, according to Ember, a clean energy think tank.
“Since Paris, there has been a remarkable amount of change happening in some way beneath the surface, in terms of national targets being established, institutions being built, and finance mechanisms being created that leads to deployment increasing, prices falling, and now meeting growing needs for electricity with clean sources,” said Euan Graham, Ember’s electricity and data analyst.
But even that rapid growth hasn’t sufficiently dented fossil fuel generation. Renewables account for less than half of global electricity generation.
The challenge going forward will be winding down fossil fuels and expanding grids and storage so renewables can better serve growing demand, Graham said.
U.S. goes in the wrong direction
Countries are required under Paris to submit new targets every five years that progressively ratchet up their efforts to cut emissions and meet the temperature goals of the agreement.
In 2015, the U.S. set a goal of cutting its climate pollution 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
It will miss that target — with emissions set to tick up slightly this year due partly to weather and increased coal use — and has never been on track to hit its 2030 goal of 50-52 percent cuts, said Ben King, director of energy and climate at the Rhodium Group.
That was true even before President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to U.S. climate policy by rolling back clean energy incentives and putting up barriers to wind and solar deployment.
Although Trump’s actions can’t be blamed for the U.S. missing its initial goals, they could derail those that have followed. An analysis published by Rhodium in September estimated that U.S. climate pollution would drop 26-35 percent by 2035 under current policy, far from the 61-66 percent commitment President Joe Biden made before he left office. A separate analysis by the University of Maryland found that actions in U.S. states could push the emissions cuts up to 44 percent.
“Policy matters a lot, particularly when you want to push to achieve substantial emissions cuts. But other factors also matter a lot,” said King, referring to clean energy investment and deployment.
Countries are setting low targets
Before COP30 convened last month in Brazil, more than 100 countries had missed multiple deadlines to submit their latest plans to cut emissions. More nations submitted them over the course of the conference, but many weren’t aligned with the Paris temperature targets.
The latest analysis by the United Nations found that based on plans submitted by 85 countries and the European Union, a bloc of 27 nations, global emissions would fall 12 percent by 2035. That’s compared to the 60 percent cut that’s needed to meet the 1.5-degree goal.
Climate Action Tracker said the progress that countries made in the five years after Paris was finalized has flattened off as governments fail to commit to stronger climate targets.
That inaction comes as fossil fuels are expanding, even as clean energy takes off.
“Our analysis shows that these two are cancelling each other out,” Climate Action Tracker said in its global update.
Money is squirting instead of surging
Paris set in motion efforts to commit progressively larger flows of funding to developing nations, while aligning money to meet climate goals. Those objectives have wavered — particularly amid U.S. hostility to climate action — but they remain a key topic in the financial sector, said Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
What needs to change is the perception that climate finance is charity, he added. “It’s about climate impacts, and these aren’t detached from the issues that are front of mind for world leaders today. They’re things like cost of living, supply chain disruptions, extreme weather disasters, forced migration and conflict.”
But the gap between what countries need and receive is wide. At the COP29 climate talks last year, countries agreed to provide poorer nations $1.3 trillion from public and private sources by 2035. That’s a huge increase. In 2023, that number was around $196 billion, according to the NRDC and the Climate Policy Initiative.
Getting the finance flowing where it’s needed is a major challenge.
Africa received about 3 percent of global climate finance in 2022, and accounts for just a fraction of total installed solar capacity, despite having 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources, according to the International Energy Agency.
Lily Odarno, Africa director at the Clean Air Task Force, blamed unresolved structural issues, such as premiums put on investments in riskier economies that can make the cost of clean energy projects up to five times more expensive. Odarno said the global climate talks is an important venue for finding solutions to those problems.
“I don’t see any other platform that provides an opportunity for countries in the developing world, and especially some of the least-developed countries in Africa, to actually join a stage and articulate what they feel is necessary for them,” Odarno said. “But I believe that it is going to have to get more grounded in reality.”
