From Climate Scepticism

By Robin Guenier

A comparison of the 30 countries that emit more than 0.5% of global greenhouse (GHG) emissions (see the European Commission’s emissions database ⁱ) with the UN’s Nationally Determined Contributions Registry ⁱⁱ  reveals that 21 of them failed to register updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as required by Article 3 of the 2015 Paris Agreement ⁱⁱⁱ, even after the deadline had been extended from February to September 2025. Yet these countries account for 57% of global emissions, while the 9 countries that did register an updated NDC account for just 25%. What’s more, with the United States (accounting for 11% of emissions) now withdrawing from the Paris Agreement ^iv, that figure falls to only 14%, leaving 71% of emissions effectively uncommitted. This undermines one of the raisons d’être of the ‘landmark’ Paris Agreement.

The Agreement was an attempt by the West and the UN to recover from the debacle of the UN’s fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen in 2009. It was a debacle because EU and US negotiators had hoped to persuade the big developing countries to accept the emission reduction obligations of developed countries. But they were humiliatingly defeated when developing countries refused to budge. This problem was reinforced as, in succeeding COPs, developing countries continued to insist they would not accept binding reduction commitments. 

To break this deadlock, the UN proposed a completely new approach for COP21 to be held in Paris in 2015. The plan was that two key innovations would be introduced: (1) an aim to hold global average temperatures to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’; and (2) a methodology whereby countries would individually determine how they would reduce emissions augmented by a periodic review when each country’s reduction plans would be steadily scaled up; the so-called ‘ratcheting’ mechanism. These proposals were both agreed; and the Agreement, regarded as an important breakthrough, was widely praised.^v

But both innovations have failed.

First, if the 2018 IPCC Special Report (para C1)^vi got it right, there’s no possibility that the ‘well below 2ºC’ aim will be achieved. This is why: the Special Report recommended that, to limit ‘global warming to below 2°C’ – i.e. to achieve the Paris Agreement’s ‘well below 2ºC’ target (Article 2.1 (a)) – global emissions should ‘decline by about 25% from 2010 levels by 2030’. Therefore, as 2010’s global CO2 emissions were 34.0 Gigatonnes (Gt), they’d have to come down to about 25.5 Gt by 2030 to meet the target. But the world’s 8 largest emitters (China, the USA, India, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil and Saudi Arabia) together already emit more than 25.5 Gt (see Endnote 1) – and all are likely to increase (or at best stabilise) their emissions over the next five years. Therefore, warming of at least 2ºC is a certainty. And that’s true even if every other country in the world reduces its emissions radically by 2030.

Moreover, as shown in the first paragraph above, the Paris Agreement’s ‘ratcheting’ mechanism – the other innovation – is clearly not working.

All this makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the Paris Agreement has failed – and, without Paris, what hope remains for the UN’s climate change campaign?

Robin Guenier October 2025

Endnotes

i https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=ghgtot#emissions_table

ii https://unfccc.int/NDCREG

iii https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf

iv https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/putting-america-first-in-international-environmental-agreements/

v https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344224160_Paris_Agreement

vi https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/