Governance and the Path Forward

International climate governance has evolved through a series of United Nations-led agreements negotiated at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, was the first treaty to set binding emissions-reduction targets, though only for a limited group of industrialized countries. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015 at COP21, marked a significant shift by asking nearly every country to submit its own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) toward a shared long-term goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C. At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, negotiators reached a widely noted, if contested, consensus text calling for a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, the first time such language had appeared explicitly in a COP outcome document.