COP21 Paris

COP21 refers to the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), convened in Le Bourget, Paris, from 30 November to 12 December 2015. It was hosted by France under the presidency of Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, with Christiana Figueres serving as UNFCCC Executive Secretary.

The summit's principal outcome was the adoption of the Paris Agreement on 12 December 2015. The treaty was opened for signature on 22 April 2016 (Earth Day) at UN Headquarters in New York and entered into force on 4 November 2016, after the dual thresholds of at least 55 Parties accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions were crossed.

Key features of the Paris Agreement include:

• A long-term temperature goal of holding the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C (Article 2).
• A bottom-up architecture built on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which each Party must prepare, communicate, and update (Article 4), with successive NDCs expected to represent a progression.
• A global stocktake every five years to assess collective progress (Article 14), the first of which concluded at COP28 in Dubai in 2023.
• Provisions on climate finance, reaffirming the goal of mobilizing climate finance for developing countries, and articles on adaptation (Article 7) and loss and damage (Article 8).

Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement applies to all Parties rather than imposing binding emission targets only on developed countries, while preserving the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC). The United States joined in 2016, announced withdrawal under President Trump in 2017, and rejoined under President Biden in 2021.