The Paris Agreement (COP21): 2015
The Paris Climate Change Agreement, adopted on 12 December 2015 by the 195 countries in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Carbon Brief: Paris Agreement infographic
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"The Paris Climate Change Agreement, adopted on 12 December 2015 by the 195 countries in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has put the whole world on course for strong and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and help all nations build a truly sustainable future for citizens everywhere.
Meaningful and effective climate change action means transforming the global economy onto a low-carbon pathway as rapidly as possible, ending the era in which fossil fuels are the dominant source of energy—in other words decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth.
It also means building a much higher level of resilience into economies and societies so that they can weather the increasingly extreme climate impacts of flood, drought and storm that are already in the system—in other words decoupling impacts from economic damage and human suffering.
The urgency of this transformation is especially critical for developing countries as it is those nations that will suffer the most acute and frequent impacts of extreme events, continuously undermining their capacity to eradicate poverty and strengthen their economies. Ultimate success will come only from peaking global emissions soon – stopping their current annual rise – and then reversing them very rapidly to a point as soon as possible later this century when remaining greenhouse gas emissions are absorbed back from the atmosphere by nature or technology."