As the gavel fell on the Paris Agreement in 2015, delegates wept and world leaders clasped hands. On January 27, 2026, the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter — formally left the global climate pact.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw on his inauguration day a year earlier and has since pledged to remove the US from several other international environmental agreements.
The Paris Agreement marked a turning point: nearly 200 nations agreed to a binding framework to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to cap the rise at 1.5 C. Scientists view 1.5 C as a critical threshold to avoid the most severe, irreversible harm from climate change. The UN now says temporarily overshooting that limit is “inevitable,” with potentially devastating consequences.
Despite significant advances in some areas, experts warn the world remains at a critical juncture. Continued burning of oil, gas and coal is driving temperatures up, intensifying deadly storms, floods and heat. The past decade has been the hottest on record, with 2024 the warmest year yet.
Temperatures have climbed since the Paris Agreement
At COP30 in Belem, Brazil, in 2025, scientists emphasized that every fraction of a degree matters for the safety and wellbeing of millions. Rising heat is estimated to be killing roughly one person per minute, and air pollution from fossil fuels is linked to about 2.5 million deaths each year.
The economic toll is also heavy: research published in The Lancet estimated global losses of up to $304 billion in 2024. Critical ecosystems are being pushed beyond their limits. In 2024 the world passed its first climate “tipping point” with massive coral die-offs driven by warming oceans. Coral reefs support a quarter of marine life and are vital for many coastal communities.
Scientists warn other tipping points — including potential Amazon rainforest dieback and disruption of major ocean currents — are alarmingly close.
What is happening to emissions?
The decade since Paris has seen continued, and in recent years accelerating, fossil fuel use. In 2024 greenhouse gas emissions reached a record 53.2 gigatons of CO2-equivalent, about 65% higher than 1990 levels. A Climate Analytics assessment found no sign of an emissions slowdown.
Two-thirds of global emissions come from eight economies: China, the US, the EU, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan. Of those, only the EU and Japan reduced emissions in 2024 compared with 2023. The vast majority of emissions originate in the energy sector.
What has been achieved since 2015?
There are notable successes. Renewable energy growth has far outpaced expectations as costs have fallen and investments in clean energy have grown, now exceeding those in fossil fuels. The share of global energy supplied by renewables has more than tripled since 2015.
In 2024 renewables produced 40% of global electricity, and in the first half of that year solar and wind met all electricity demand growth, surpassing coal for the first time. Global solar capacity is now far higher than 2015 forecasts, and wind capacity has tripled.
Even in the US — where federal policy under the Trump administration rolled back some support for renewables — clean energy expanded. Between January and September 2025, renewables plus battery storage accounted for 93% of newly added US grid capacity.
China is leading solar expansion, having installed more solar in 2024 than the rest of the world combined. Electric vehicles have jumped from around 1% of global car sales in 2015 to nearly a quarter of sales, putting the world on track to reach 100 million EVs on the road by 2030 ahead of schedule.
But progress has caveats. Coal use reached record global levels last year, and public finance for fossil fuels rose to about $1.6 trillion per year.
Will the world fulfill the Paris Agreement goals?
Experts say current action is still far from sufficient. Without the Paris Agreement, warming could have reached around 4 C by century’s end. Under current national pledges, if fully implemented, warming is projected at roughly 2.3–2.5 C — markedly better than no Paris deal but still leaving the world exposed to much more extreme heat, storms and sea-level rise than under 1.5 C.
Ahead of the Belem summit, many countries were still submitting updated commitments; more than 65 nations had not delivered new pledges. A UN analysis estimates current national commitments would cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by about 12% by 2035 relative to 2019, but that will not keep warming below 2 C.
Meeting the Paris goals now requires a massive acceleration in ambition: phasing out coal roughly ten times faster this decade, expanding efforts to halt deforestation nine-fold, doubling renewable growth, raising global climate finance by nearly $1 trillion per year, and rapidly scaling public transport in the world’s most polluting cities.
Additional reporting by Katharina Schantz.
Edited by: Tamsin Walker
This article was originally published on 12 November 2025, and was updated on 27 January 2026 to reflect that the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has come into effect.