As soon as he took office last Monday (20), the President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed a decree withdrawing the country from the Paris Agreement about climate change. Immediately, the spokesperson for the secretary general of the United Nations (UN), Stephane Dujarric, released a statement recognizing the country’s relevance in leading environmental issues and highlighting the importance of continued leadership by North American states and companies .
Officially, Trump’s decision has not yet reached the hands of the depositary of the international treaty, UN Secretary General, António Guterres, as provided for in Article 28 of the Paris Agreement itself. “At any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving written notice to the Depositary,” the document says.
In the case of the United States, the three years started counting on November 4, 2016, as for the majority of signatory countries that joined the treaty on December 12, 2015, when the instrument was officially adopted during COP21, in Paris. . For this reason, despite Trump announcing his first departure from the country in 2017, the official request was only sent in November 2019, for it to be valid.
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Similarly, Article 28 of the Paris Agreement also states that “any withdrawal shall take effect within one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or such later date as specified in the notification of withdrawal.” . Thus, the decision only took effect two months before Trump left the White House in his first term, leaving almost no time for the impact to be significant before the then-elected president, Joe Biden, revoked the measure.
Although he expressed a series of anti-environmentalist measures even before being re-elected, Trump, as in the previous term, announced his withdrawal only from the Paris Agreement and not from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which would result in the withdrawal of both treaties.
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For the senior manager of climate action at WRI Brasil, Míriam Garcia, when the United States leaves, the country will continue to maintain global commitments to combat climate change. “In the different negotiation tracks, you have some tracks that refer to the Paris Agreement and the operationalization of the Paris Agreement, and you have some tracks that are given to the question of the budget of the convention itself or the structure of the convention. So, in all these spheres, the United States still continues”, he assesses.
This time, if the document is received by the UN in 2025, the one-year period will begin to run and the decision will take effect in Trump’s second year in office, in 2026. In the assessment of the international policy specialist at the ClimaInfo Institute, Bruno Toledo, in addition to this new US withdrawal from the treaty lasting longer, the measure also occurs today in another context. “Back in 2017, it was the recent approval of the Paris Agreement, just two years after 2015. So, in a certain way, let’s say that the public mood was much more optimistic because of that success”, he highlights.
Threat
After ten years, Toledo considers that there has been a deterioration in the engagement of the parties to the treaty, as they have not reached consensus to implement measures that guarantee the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and the consequent containment of the increase in the planet’s temperature. “In 2017, you still had optimism due to the Paris experience and today there is much more frustration. So, this is a risk that we didn’t have back then. How much this frustration can contaminate not only countries, but also observers.”, he says.
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On the other hand, Bruno highlights that multilateral treaties such as the Paris Agreement are still the main way to advance in the construction of policies to face global emergencies, such as climate change. “It is the only international treaty we have, in which practically all governments in the world commit to targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions”, he highlights.
Miriam says that it is necessary to remember that the Paris Agreement is the result of a long process of building consensus for an intergovernmental architecture that enables actions to face the challenges posed by climate change. “It is through this perspective of strengthening multilateralism and the different tools that exist under the umbrella of the Paris Agreement that we will be able to achieve the mitigation and adaptation goals.”
For the expert, these goals are dynamic and follow the volatility of geopolitics, but should not serve as a question of multilateral mechanisms such as the Paris Agreement. “We need to look at the agreement as an instrument that guarantees the participation of all countries, because each country there has one vote from the signatories of the Paris Agreement. And seek the necessary reforms in this multilateral space so that it can continue responding to the challenges that are only increasing.”
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Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement is one of the tools of the UNFCCC, which was the first multilateral treaty on the topic signed by countries at Eco92, in Rio de Janeiro. “The Paris Agreement is like a sub-agreement, because it is within a larger umbrella, which is the United Nations Convention on Climate Change”, explains Bruno Toledo.
The expert recalls that, after the creation of this first treaty, in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was created, which was the first tool designed to reduce global emissions.
“In the Kyoto Protocol, only developed countries, those industrialized, that had commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but unfortunately, due to political issues, soon after the United States, which was part of the protocol, left , during the George W. Bush government in 2001, and as a result the treaty ends up losing a lot of strength.”
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The protocol also did not reach large emitters, classified as still developing countries. “China in the 90s was not among the major emitters of greenhouse gases, but all that explosion of economic growth they had between the end of the 90s and the second half of the 2000s placed the Chinese as one of the main emitters of greenhouse gases. planet”, he recalls.
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Political differences and tensions between China and the United States, in 2009, in the context of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP15) in Copenhagen (Denmark), blocked a new agreement. And only in 2015, negotiations resulted in the Paris Agreement.
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The treaty brings together in 29 articles the objectives, rules and methodologies to achieve the goals of keeping the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C in relation to pre-industrial levels, increasing the capacity to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change and make financial flows compatible with a path towards development with low greenhouse gas emissions and resilient to climate change.
It also provides for periodic assessments, as in article 14, which establishes the preparation of a Global Assessment to “evaluate collective progress towards the objective of the Agreement and its long-term goals”. The first document was delivered in Dubai, during COP28, in 2023.
Among the assessments are estimates for global emissions mitigation efforts, the advancement of adaptation capacity and the means of implementation, such as financing, for example.
Given the first results, countries party to the Paris Agreement will have until February 2025 to deliver the third generation of the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), which defines ambitions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. . , and made a commitment to reduce the problem in its territory from 59% to 67% in 2035.
For the WRI Brasil manager, a good thermometer to assess countries’ engagement will be the ambitions presented up to COP30, in Brazil, in November.
“There is an expectation that a good part of these NDCs will come by September. And it is more important to have good NDCs than ambitions that are not so good on time. So, it is about working so that we can see, in the commitments that countries make to the international community, a greater scale of mitigation actions, greater recognition of the importance of adaptation and the role of financing that each of these countries will place”, concludes.
