“This will be the second time that the United States has been the main force behind the negotiations on a new climate agreement – with the Kyoto Protocol, we never ratified it, we left it in the case of the Paris Agreement.” The Paris Agreement provides a sustainable framework that guides global efforts for decades to come. The goal is to increase countries` climate goals over time. To promote this situation, the agreement provides for two review processes of a five-year cycle each. “What Obama did at the end of his second term was fundamentally undemocratic to sign a Paris agreement without going to the Senate and Congress and to do it by executive order,” said Yvo De Boer, former UN climate chief. To promote the integrated approach it is implementing, France continues to be committed to maintaining the momentum created by COP21. She therefore actively participated in COP23 held in Bonn (Germany) in November 2017. States met to work on formulating the rules for implementing the Paris Agreement and discuss raising the level of ambition of national climate commitments. To address climate change and its negative effects, 197 countries adopted the Paris Agreement at COP21 in Paris on 12 December 2015. The agreement, which entered into force less than a year later, aims to significantly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius this century, while ways are being pursued to further limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. Nicolas Holiber`s sculptures in used wood illustrate the threat that climate change poses to city dwellers. Recognizing that many developing countries and small island states that have contributed the least to climate change are most likely to suffer the consequences, the Paris Agreement contains a plan for developed countries – and others that “are able to do so” – to continue to provide financial resources to help developing countries mitigate and increase their resilience to climate change.

The agreement builds on the financial commitments of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which aimed to scale public and private climate finance for developing countries to $100 billion a year by 2020. (To put that in perspective, global military spending amounted to about $1.7 trillion in 2017 alone, more than a third of which came from the United States.) The Copenhagen Pact also created the Green Climate Fund to mobilize transformative financial funds with targeted public dollars. And the agreement includes an obligation for countries to announce their next round of targets every five years, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed at this target but did not contain a specific requirement to achieve it. The Paris Agreement is a pioneering environmental agreement adopted by almost all nations in 2015 to combat climate change and its negative effects. The agreement aims to significantly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during this century, while pursuing ways to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. . . .