← Signals
Recordeddatescience

The Paris Agreement is adopted at COP21

The twenty-first Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopts the Paris Agreement at Le Bourget, near Paris. Its temperature goal is to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to one and a half degrees. Its architecture is the significant part for this Journey: unlike the Kyoto Protocol it assigns no allocated targets, and instead requires each party to submit a nationally determined contribution, to update it periodically on a ratcheting cycle, and to report against it. There is no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for missing a contribution. The agreement is therefore a transparency and ratchet instrument rather than a compliance one — a design choice that made universal participation possible and made delivery a domestic political question in every signatory state.

Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.

Subjects

Evidence

Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.

Recorded on The electrified share of final energy

  1. The Paris Agreement is adopted at COP21
  2. The Paris Agreement enters into force
  3. The first calendar year above 1.5 °C above pre-industrial
  4. United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement takes effect

Related

Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.