Paris Climate Agreement

The Paris Climate Agreement is a landmark international agreement on climate change adopted at COP21 in Paris in 2015. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement succeeded where other international agreements failed, in part by adopting a system of voluntary emissions reduction commitments. These Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) represent a departure from the legally binding commitments of previous treaties. The current NDCs call for the world to keep its emissions about 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Key to the Paris Agreement, however, is the "ratchet" mechanism, which calls for revisions to pledges every five years, with the expectation that they will be increasingly ambitious. The first global stocktake will take place in 2023. Such "name and shame" approaches have been used successfully in international politics in the past.

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