The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics

Countries reached agreement on a new climate treaty that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described as 'a monumental triumph for people and our planet'. 1 The Paris Agreement represented a remarkable reversal of fortune for the UN-sponsored climate negotiations. After adopting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which established the objective of preventing dangerous human-induced climate change by stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere, the international community spent over two decades negotiating legally binding rules on how to rein in global emissions. But despite the creation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and instruments such as the Clean Development…