10 Years After the Paris Climate Deal: What The World Got Right, Wrong, And What Comes Next |
This is the year it became clear that the world is now living in climate overshoot—where global temperatures exceed agreed limits, entering a range increasingly dangerous for both the planet and humanity.
New global analyses show that average warming over the past three years has already exceeded 1.5°C, the threshold nations agreed in Paris we should avoid “if at all possible.” But global averages hide the reality people are already experiencing. Parts of the Arctic, Central and Eastern Europe, and North America are now 3–7°C hotter than pre-industrial levels. Whether this overshoot is brief or prolonged will shape the stability of societies for decades.
I served as the U.K.’s Climate Envoy in the run-up to the 2015 U.N. climate conference in Paris. By the time negotiators arrived, I was confident an agreement could be reached. Not because success was guaranteed, but because more than a decade of painstaking diplomacy had already done the hard work. Climate attachés across embassies, negotiating teams in capitals, and years of quiet relationship-building laid the foundations. The Paris Agreement showed what multilateralism can deliver when science guides policy and shared survival outweighs short-term politics.
A decade on, that environment has changed. Politics in many countries has become more polarized and combustible. Trust between governments has thinned, not just on climate but across global cooperation more broadly. The United States stepping back from consistent climate leadership has been a defining factor. The idea that a single summit can deliver universal consensus now looks........