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What the Paris Agreement Was Built to Do — and Why It Still Matters
The Paris Agreement remains central to global climate cooperation. But understanding what it can and cannot deliver will be key to advancing climate action in a changing geopolitical landscape.
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The Paris Agreement is now in its second decade — and facing its toughest geopolitical environment yet.
When the accord was adopted in 2015, it was a breakthrough. For the first time, the international community reached a universal agreement to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). Over the last ten years, projections of global temperature increases have been revised from more than 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) to less than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F). Renewable energy, electric vehicles and battery storage are expanding rapidly and becoming increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Progress is real, even if it is uneven.
But the international cooperation that made this progress possible is under growing strain. Military conflicts, deepening trade and economic tensions, and the United States withdrawing from both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement have seriously challenged the cooperative spirit on which the Agreement was built.
At the same time, global emissions continue to rise, climate impacts are intensifying and resources for climate action remain insufficient — raising questions about whether existing institutions can drive change at the pace and scale required. Addressing climate change means transforming every sector of the economy to deliver inclusive growth while decarbonizing and building climate resilience. That depends on governments, businesses, financial institutions and civil society working together to drive country transitions. It also requires collaboration beyond UN climate negotiations, including through international forums such as the G7 and G20, multilateral development banks and regional and bilateral partnerships.
As climate action increasingly demands coordination across a wider range of sectors and institutions, it’s worth reflecting on why the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC remain critical to that effort, especially given today’s geopolitical and climate diplomacy landscape. Understanding what the Paris Agreement can — and cannot — achieve is essential to ensuring it continues to spur international climate action and deliver a more just, equitable, climate-resilient and low-carbon future.
What Was the Paris Agreement Designed to Do?
Building on the UNFCCC, the Paris Agreement was designed to provide a framework through which countries could strengthen climate commitments, track progress and cooperate to achieve long-term climate goals.
While a catalyst for action, the Paris Agreement cannot directly implement climate policy, mobilize finance itself or force countries to meet their goals. These limitations are not evidence that the Agreement is not working; rather, they reflect a misunderstanding of what it was built to do. Greenhouse gas emissions will not fall and climate resilience will not increase solely because of a UN process. That will happen when governments, businesses and communities take action.
Countries, businesses and financial actors are responsible for turning broad global goals into national action. But that responsibility translates into progress only with the right political and enabling conditions — including supportive trade policies, favorable international financial systems and effective corporate regulations — to make the transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient future economically viable.
The Agreement has increased engagement to tackle the climate crisis globally, including at high political levels with leaders’ summits at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP). It also provides the framework for countries to commit to climate action through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and report on progress through climate transparency reports. Taken together, the developments in Paris and the UN climate regime have helped shape planning and action by establishing overarching climate goals and a framework for nationally-driven implementation on the ground. This provides a critical underpinning for countries to integrate climate plans and policies into sectoral and economic planning and the policies and investment choices to drive implementation at scale.
The Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC retain unique and distinct functions, albeit with real limits. Here are three areas where they remain vital in the years ahead, and where clarity on what they can and cannot deliver matters most:
1. Provide a central global political platform for climate action
Over the last 30 years, the UN climate change process has served as a cornerstone of international climate cooperation, with COPs becoming a powerful platform. As meetings of the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC, COPs give every country a seat at the table — regardless of economic size or geopolitical power. For many smaller and capacity-constrained countries, this UN process is one of the few venues where their voices carry formal weight in shaping the global response to a climate crisis they did little to create. Without the UN climate process, the countries most affected by climate change risk losing their say in a global debate that is otherwise shaped by the wealthiest and most powerful nations.
The COPs have grown into something larger than diplomacy, drawing tens of thousands of people, including heads of state, ministers, negotiators, news media, advocates, scientists and business leaders, who converge on a host city. For example, more than 150 heads of state and government traveled to COP28 in Dubai in 2023. While climate change commands headlines year-round, COP season turns up the volume like nothing else. The COP platform has served as a center stage for pushing political conversations further and positioning the UN climate process as a central hub for climate diplomacy.
In recent years, COPs have also served as launch points for important coalitions and initiatives to drive change. These have included collective efforts to address vital issues, such as the Global Methane Pledge to reduce methane emissions and the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. While more needs to be done to ensure such coalitions and initiatives move the needle, COPs deserve credit for fostering a large ecosystem of efforts focused on advancing climate solutions. Future COPs can provide even more opportunities to showcase the impact of the Global Climate Action Agenda, track government participation in cooperative initiatives and demonstrate measurable progress.
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2. Provide a vision for the future of climate action and support through collective ambitions
Formal negotiated outcomes from UN climate negotiations bring nearly 200 countries together, often establishing shared global ambition on key climate and climate-related issues.
At times, these negotiations have set critically important directions for climate action. For example, the Paris Agreement negotiations established 1.5 degrees C as the accepted global temperature benchmark, articulated the vital need to achieve net-zero emissions and defined a framework for a global goal on adaptation involving key sectors such as health and food.
In recent years, the Global Stocktake and other COP outcomes have established joint global objectives on specific issues such as energy and forests. The first Global Stocktake — the Paris Agreement’s process for assessing progress every five years — concluded at COP28 in 2023, when countries agreed to triple renewable energy capacity, double the rate of energy efficiency improvements, transition away from fossil fuels, halt net deforestation and significantly reduce transport emissions.
The negotiation process can be a slog, but it remains valuable even when consensus is just out of reach. The debates themselves help define shared priorities and shape the direction of future climate action.
The ongoing debate over transitioning away from fossil fuels illustrates both the Paris Agreement’s influence and its limits. At COP30 in 2025, for instance, the formal negotiations failed to advance how to transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner. Yet the fact that nations were debating whether to further address the terms of that transition — not whether it should happen at all — marks a profound shift from where the world stood a decade ago, when “fossil fuels” was not mentioned once in the Paris Agreement. The debate at COP30 also prompted the COP Presidency to begin developing a roadmap exploring implementation barriers and opportunities, while a group of willing countries, experts and partners gathered in Colombia in early 2026 — and will do so again in 2027 — to advance collaboration on transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Collective ambition also extends to climate finance. Access to climate finance, technology and capacity building is essential for implementing the policies laid out in NDCs, national adaptation plans or long-term strategies. Yet climate finance continues to fall far short of global needs, and previous climate finance commitments were met only after delay. For example, in 2009, developed countries pledged to mobilize $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020. That goal was finally met in 2022 and extended through to 2025 as agreed in Paris. Now, countries have set a new finance goal for 2035 to deliver at least $300 billion annually and called on all actors to mobilize $1.3 trillion in international climate finance by 2035. At COP30, countries also agreed to at least triple adaptation finance, also by 2035.
Although the Paris Agreement and the UN climate process do not provide direct financing, they play an essential role in setting expectations, monitoring progress, sustaining political pressure and reinforcing developed countries' obligations to take the lead in supporting developing nations. Unlocking the necessary capital requires all components of the financial system—from governments and development banks to private financial institutions—to work together. As demonstrated by the Baku to Belém Roadmap, this system-wide approach is critical to mobilizing $1.3 trillion by 2035, and ultimately meeting the $3.4 trillion in domestic and international finance estimated to be needed by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance.
3. Shape country-level implementation and spotlight national and collective climate progress
“No more promises, more action” has become a rallying cry around the climate negotiations. But there is confusion about how the Paris Agreement actually shapes implementation. The Agreement and UN climate process do not implement climate policy, prescribe specific laws or require countries to adopt particular approaches. So what is the role of the Paris Agreement and UN climate process in implementation?
The UN climate process and the Paris Agreement are intertwined with and supportive of implementation by providing frameworks for national planning, tracking progress and creating opportunities for peer learning and exchange.
Most important, NDCs, NAPs and LTSs sit at the core of the Paris Agreement’s efforts to advance implementation. These are the primary vehicles for each country to lay out its steps on climate action — across multiple sectors — to reduce emissions and build resilience to climate impacts in a way that is consistent with broader economic and sustainable development objectives.
These vehicles are connected to the multilateral process because the Paris Agreement prompts their development, but their value lies in translating global goals into nationally owned climate targets, plans and policies. 2025 was a crucial year in the Paris Agreement’s ambition cycle, when countries were expected to present new NDCs. Among the countries that have communicated new NDCs, their topline targets cut emissions by less than 6% of what’s needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C. But they also include specific goals and policies that have the potential to drive the sectoral and governance changes needed for effective climate action.
For example, the number of NDCs with action-oriented urban content has doubled from previous cycles, while more than 90% of coastal and island nations included ocean-based action in their latest NDCs, up from 62% in 2015. New NDCs increasingly reflected energy transition commitments, including 61 countries with a quantified target for reducing the share of fossil fuels in their electricity mix. Eighty percent of new NDCs highlight a just transition, more than half enhanced their adaptation commitments, nearly 70 reflected transport targets and more than 100 included transport actions.
These climate plans and policies are important for national ownership of global goals. But their greatest value is that they can provide a crucial step toward integrating climate action into mainstream economic and sectoral plans, policies and investments. This, in turn, can help drive country transitions at scale, supported by political will and institutional capacity.
Showcasing national implementation is a central element of the Paris Agreement. Under the Paris Agreement’s enhanced transparency framework, countries report every two years on their greenhouse gas emissions, progress toward their NDCs, climate change impacts and adaptation, and financial, technical and capacity-building support. These national climate progress reports — referred to as biennial transparency reports — create a common body of data on countries’ efforts and progress toward achieving their NDC targets.
This data and information also enable countries to understand the progress made by their peers and allow the media and civil society to hold countries accountable for meeting their targets. The data may not always be perfect — information is self-reported by countries, some of which face capacity constraints — but it remains valuable, especially when complemented by other data and information outside the formal process, including information reported by non-state actors and other progress assessments.
Finally, outside the limelight of politically charged negotiations, the UN climate process allows for unglamorous but important technical and policy exchanges. However, there are justifiable concerns over the growing number of work programs, dialogues, expert committees and other bodies that underpin the Paris Agreement, which have begun to weigh down the process. Brief sessions squeezed into an already packed conference schedule and attended by a mix of negotiators and implementers may not be the ideal format for these exchanges. But, complemented by forums at regional climate weeks and elsewhere, they can play a role in sharing implementation experience and exchanging good practices.
Getting the Most Out of the Paris Agreement’s Next Decade
Addressing climate change requires transformation across every sector of the economy and a whole-of-government approach. Implementing climate action at scale will require moving beyond purely climate-focused institutions and processes to a much wider set of political, economic, financial and security actors and institutions, as well as beyond national governments to subnational governments, the private sector and civil society.
The Paris Agreement is not the only forum for advancing climate action and diplomacy. Coalitions of the willing, bilateral partnerships, regional forums and other global arenas are all essential to advancing climate action and supporting implementation, with each playing unique and valuable roles. The Paris Agreement is just one piece of a multifaceted approach to climate action. It is not a silver bullet. But holding clear and realistic expectations for what the Paris Agreement, COPs and UN climate processes can actually achieve can help us focus our efforts more effectively.
In the years ahead, the Agreement can continue to play a central role in providing a high-profile and inclusive political space for climate issues, establishing collective ambition, spurring national-level commitment and supporting implementation and accountability. The task is to vigorously pursue opportunities to improve and strengthen the Paris Agreement while recognizing what it was and was not designed to do. Complementing it with a broader, multifaceted approach can accelerate global cooperation and the action essential to tackling the climate crisis. We must also increasingly integrate climate action into wider economic and sectoral country transitions.