On December 12, 2015, at the end of two weeks of intensive negotiations at Le Bourget,the 195 States gathered under the aegis of the UN adopted the Paris Climate Agreement, marking a major diplomatic turning point in the fight against climate change. At the podium, Laurent Fabius - then French Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of COP 21 - triggered the official adoption by placing his gavel on the lectern and pronouncing the solemn phrase "I see there are no objections in the room: I have the honor to declare the Paris Climate Agreement adopted". A long ovation followed, sounding like the recognition of the culmination of a global consensus, but also the inaugural point of fragility in a collective gamble on transforming the world.
When the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, its ambition was twofold: to set a global climate course shared by all the countries on the planet, and to establish a governance system flexible enough to convince 195 states, while remaining robust enough to guide their emissions trajectories. After several decades of alarming scientific reports, the international community has agreed to lay the foundations for keeping temperature rises "well below +2°C compared to the pre-industrial era", with a target of no more than +1.5°C.
One of the major changes introduced by the Paris Agreement is the introduction of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The agreement breaks with the top-down logic of the Kyoto Protocol to inaugurate a bottom-up approach: each country freely defines its own emissions reduction trajectory, according to its capacities, level of development and energy situation. States must participate and revise their ambitions upwards every five years. Ten years on, 2025 marks a new round of submissions: these updated NDCs should guide the discussions at COP30 in Belém and determine the level of ambition. However, by November 20, 2025, only 118 countries had submitted their new contributions, a delay that illustrates the persistent difficulty of aligning national commitments with the expected momentum of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Climate Agreement also recognized the shared but differentiated responsibilities of the world's countries. Northern countries pledged to mobilize $100 billion a year, starting in 2020, to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to climate change. Ten years on, the results are mixed. The target was indeed reached, but two years late, in 2022, thanks in particular to an increase in US contributions under Joe Biden, a sharp rise in loans from multilateral banks and the mobilization of private funding. However, a number of limitations remain: more than half of the funds earmarked for the least developed countries are in fact loans, exacerbating their indebtedness; a large proportion of the funding goes to emerging economies such as India and China, rather than to the most vulnerable countries; finally, the share of adaptation remains low (33%), far from the balance envisaged by the Paris Agreement. In other words, the promise is kept on paper, but still far from the spirit of climate justice enshrined in the agreement.
If COP 21 did indeed lay the foundations for climate governance, the COPs that followed it have also made their contribution to the edifice. COP 24 in Katowice in 2018 drew up the "rulebook", an instruction manual for the operational application of the Paris Agreement. In 2022, COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh decided to set up a "loss and damage" fund for countries most vulnerable to extreme weather events. COP 28 in Dubai in 2023 recognized the need for a "transition away from fossil fuels", an unprecedented signal but one that comes with a cautious text and loopholes that could limit the scope of this commitment. In short, while each COP has failed to live up to expectations, they have nonetheless enabled step-by-step progress towards more structured climate governance - an edifice that is still fragile, but indispensable, and whose foundations must now be strengthened at COP 30 to transform these commitments into real, measurable action.
Belém. 2025. Ten years on. The time has come to take stock, in order to recalibrate commitments for the next ten years and finally respond to the climate emergency. 2050 is approaching, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not falling, or at least not enough. As early as 2013, the IPCC announced that the global average temperature depended on the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Limiting warming to +1.5°C is no longer realistic: according to the journal Earth System Science Data, this objective has become unattainable. To stay below this threshold, global emissions would have had to be cut by 42% by 2030 compared with 2019; but we are heading for -4%. The trajectory has improved slightly since 2015, but it still takes us towards +2.6 to +2.9°C of warming (UNEP), a long way from the commitments needed to reach the Paris Agreement targets.
In fact, in 2024, the global average temperature has already exceeded +1.5°C, making it the hottest year ever recorded on Earth. This is yet another alarming signal. According to the European Commission, by 2025, more than a million hectares will have burned, a 3-fold increase on the 2006-2024 average. Furthermore, a Yale study indicates that the number of natural disasters due to climate change increased by 83% between the periods 1980-1999 and 2000-2020.
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are also showing major limitations in their deployment. There are two major problems: on the one hand, they remain insufficiently ambitious; on the other, their implementation is too slow to meet climate targets that are already too low. Although they are legally binding, since the Paris Agreement has the status of an international treaty, in practice there is no mechanism for sanctioning a country whose ambitions are too low. This weakness is all the more problematic given that public policies tend to favour immediate emission reductions - the most visible measures in the short term - at the risk of delaying the structural transformations that are essential to guarantee a deep and sustainable reduction in the long term. What's more, the world's second-largest polluter, the United States, illustrates this systemic fragility: the country currently has no emissions reduction targets, having left the Paris Agreement for the second time under President Donald Trump. The United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is sometimes presented as a fatal blow, since the country accounts for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the United States is more than just its president: major corporations, SMEs, federal states and civil society remain strongly committed to the climate. At COP 30, this mobilization is reflected in the presence of Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, and the C40 Cities network, which brings together a number of American cities active in the fight against climate change.
In fact, this dynamic is helping to provide grounds for hope for the Paris Agreement. For the first time, COP21 has created a real space for climate justice. The Paris Agreement now constitutes a central legal foundation for many non-state actors, facilitating recourse against states and companies that fail to meet their commitments. Since its adoption, climate litigation has intensified considerably: the number of environmental lawsuits has risen from around a hundred a year before 2015 to between 200 and 300 a year(Le Monde). The opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2025 also marks a turning point: the violation of climate obligations is now qualified as an "internationally wrongful act" engaging the responsibility of States. Referred to by Vanuatu, the Court opens the way to claims for reparation against major emitters, and affirms strict obligations to protect the climate, including for future generations. This dynamic no longer only concerns public authorities: multinationals are in turn being targeted for their failure to align with the targets set in 2015. In France, the most emblematic example is TotalEnergies, which is being sued by victims of climate change and several NGOs for "failure to exercise due diligence" and "endangering others", on the grounds that its climate strategy is not compatible with the trajectories required by the Paris Agreement. This increasing judicialization shows how this text has become a lever for accountability, enabling greater control not only of public policies, but also of the strategies of major corporate emitters.
What's more, the Paris Agreement has helped redirect some of the world's financial flows towards renewable energies, which in many regions have become cheaper than fossil fuels. This dynamic has supported rapid growth in solar and wind power, to the point where renewables overtook coal for the first time in the first half of 2025 in terms of global electricity production. However, progress remains uneven: in several countries, fossil-fired capacity also continues to grow, limiting the structural decline of oil, gas and coal.
South Korea's announcement at COP30 illustrates this uneven transition: the country, which still derives a third of its electricity from coal and operates the world's seventh-largest fleet of coal-fired power plants, has pledged to phase out all coal-fired power plants without capture and to halt all new construction. Seoul joins the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) and plans to close 40 of its 61 plants by 2040, with the remainder to follow according to their economic and environmental feasibility. Despite this persistent dependence, the share of coal in South Korean electricity has already fallen from 46.3% in 2009 to 30.5% in 2024, a sign of a transition that is underway but still needs to be accelerated.
Ten years after Paris, COP30 in Belém must be the COP of implementation. As Laurent Fabius, head of the Cercle des Présidents de COP, reminds us, it's no longer a question of "tossing great ideas into the air", but of finally ensuring that the commitments made are respected: limiting the exploitation of oil and coal, accelerating the deployment of renewable energies and genuinely involving businesses and local players.
Added to these imperatives is methane, a gas whose warming power is almost 80 times greater than that of CO₂ and which accounts for a third of global warming. At Belém, progress remained limited: only a dozen countries committed to reducing fossil fuel emissions and ending flaring by 2030, while seven states will receive financial support to treat these "superpollutants". But major emitters are lagging behind, and emissions continue to rise, even though a package of measures already available could reduce them by a third by 2030. Hence the urgent need to "act quickly and decisively"(Laurent Fabius): without real progress on methane, the gap between Paris promises and climate reality will continue to widen.
In Belem, COP30 once again revealed the extent of the stalemate caused by the financial issue: without visibility on flows, and without trust between countries in the North and South, no progress on climate ambition, adaptation or trade is possible. This financial knot, which prevents the emergence of a genuine "basket of solutions", shows just how much responses to climate change today require new bridges between public and private players. This is precisely where July Advisory is working: by bringing together institutions, investors, companies and territories, structuring hybrid models and mobilizing sustainable finance and ecological accounting tools, the firm is striving to build the value chains, methodologies and cooperation that are still missing from international negotiations.
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