A COMPARISON of the 30 countries that emit more than 0.5 per cent of global greenhouse (GHG) emissions (see the European Commission’s emissions database) with the UN’s Nationally Determined Contributions Registry reveals that 21 of them failed to register updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as required by Article 3 of the 2015 Paris Agreement, even after the deadline had been extended from February this year to last month. Yet these countries account for 57 per cent of global emissions, while the nine countries that did register an updated NDC account for just 25 per cent. What’s more, with the United States (accounting for 11 per cent of emissions) now withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements – The White House that figure falls to only 14 per cent, leaving 71 per cent of emissions effectively uncommitted. This undermines one of the raisons d’être of the ‘landmark’ Paris Agreement.
The Agreement was an attempt by the West and the UN to recover from the debacle of the UN’s fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009. It was a debacle because EU and US negotiators had hoped to persuade the big developing countries to accept the emission reduction obligations of developed countries. They were humiliatingly defeated when developing countries refused to budge. This problem was reinforced as, in succeeding COPs, developing countries continued to insist they would not accept binding reduction commitments.
To break this deadlock, the UN proposed a completely new approach for COP21 to be held in Paris in 2015. The plan was that two key innovations would be introduced: (1) an aim to hold global average temperatures to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’; and (2) a methodology whereby countries would individually determine how they would reduce emissions augmented by a periodic review when each country’s reduction plans would be steadily scaled up; the so-called ‘ratcheting’ mechanism. These proposals were both agreed; and the Agreement, regarded as an important breakthrough, was widely praised.
But both innovations have failed.
First, if the 2018 IPCC Special Report got it right, there’s no possibility that the ‘well below 2°C’ aim will be achieved. This is why: the Special Report recommended that, to limit ‘global warming to below 2°C’ – i.e. to achieve the Paris Agreement’s ‘well below 2°C’ target – global emissions should ‘decline by about 25 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030’. Therefore, as 2010’s global CO2 emissions were 34 Gigatonnes (Gt), they’d have to come down to about 25.5 Gt by 2030 to meet the target. But the world’s eight largest emitters (China, the US, India, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil and Saudi Arabia) together already emit more than 25.5 Gt – and all are likely to increase (or at best stabilise) their emissions over the next five years. Therefore warming of at least 2°C is a certainty. And that’s true even if every other country in the world reduces its emissions radically by 2030.
Moreover, as shown in the first paragraph above, the Paris Agreement’s ‘ratcheting’ mechanism – the other innovation – is clearly not working.
All this makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the Paris Agreement has failed – and, without Paris, what hope remains for the UN’s climate change campaign?
This article appeared on Climate Sceptism on October 13, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
