About Paris
At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) marked the first international treaty to address the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by nation states to attempt to avert the impending disaster of global climate change. By December 1997, the UNFCC was expanded into the Kyoto Protocol which set legally binding emissions reductions targets; however the protocol was not implemented until 2005. In the meantime, the United States signed on to the protocol but never ratified it in Congress. Furthermore, many if not most nations, particularly the most-developed, including the U.S., failed to meet emission reduction goals and/or withdrew from the protocol. In December of 2015, the UN held their annual climate change conference in Paris, France to assess the progress on international greenhouse gas emission reductions, as well as update the Kyoto Protocol. During this conference, a new accord, known as the Paris Agre...