The world has failed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but the commitments in the deal have helped to more than double renewables capacity to 4,442GW over the last ten years. The deal has also shown staying power despite huge global changes.
It is ten years since leaders of 194 countries and the European Union signed the Paris Agreement on climate change in the French capital city.
On 12th December 2015, at the United Nation’s COP21 Climate Change Conference, superpowers including China and the United States joined nations from around the world by committing to limit global warming. Their goal was to limit growth to well below 2°C higher, and ideally 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. Parties then signed the deal from 22nd April 2016 and it was ratified on 4th November 2016.
The Paris Agreement committed countries to make and implement climate and emissions reduction plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions; and to mobilise $100bn a year from developed countries to support developing nations.
The agreement also established mechanisms such as the Enhanced Transparency Framework and Global Stocktake to encourage countries to transparently report on their carbon emissions and assess their long-term progress.
Political challenges
But progress for the Paris Agreement has not always been straightforward.
President Trump pulled the US out of the deal during his first presidential term, with the exit becoming official in November 2020, and has started the three-year withdrawal process again after an executive order signed in January 2025 at the start of his second presidential term. Countries including China and India have also sought to water down key elements of the agreement during negotiations at subsequent COP conferences, but the agreement has remained intact.
Interventions like these mean the Paris Agreement has been only partly successful in reducing carbon emissions and supporting global moves to renewable energy. The UN has reported that the world has so far failed to meet the goals needed to keep global warming on track for 2°C or less by the end of the 21st century.
Even so, it has predicted that these targets goals could still be achieved with steep cuts to carbon emissions, and said steps taken so far should limit global warming by the end of this century to around 2.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels. That is an improvement compared to the previously forecast rise of between 3.7°C and 4.8°C.
The Paris Agreement has also supported rapid growth of renewables globally, but the expected energy transition is moving slowly because fossil fuel use keeps rising.
Slow progress on the energy transition
The International Renewable Energy Agency’s 2025 statistics show that total renewable energy installed globally grew from 1,849GW at the start of 2016 to 4,442GW at the start of 2025. This includes a tripling of wind over the same period from 416GW to 1,133GW while solar expanded sevenfold from 226GW to 1,866GW.
The good news is this shows the electricity mix is getting greener, but the bad news is fossil fuels account for around 87% of energy used globally today – which is only slightly down from 89% in 2015. Most new renewable energy capacity is going to meet new electricity demand, which currently includes supporting the rapid rollout of artificial intelligence (AI), rather than replacing fossil fuels. The Paris Agreement might have slowed global growth in carbon emissions but has not reversed the trend.
DNV picked up this topic last month in its ‘Energy Transition Outlook 2025’ report, where it concluded that the energy transition is “most definitely” not “stalled or in reverse” but said there would be a “marginally slower transition” than it forecast in 2024 due to political changes.
The report said cheap renewables such as solar and wind were an “unstoppable force” that would make up 32% of the global electricity mix by 2030, with huge support from energy storage technology. It added that more expensive technologies including hydrogen, floating wind and new nuclear would only begin to grow rapidly in the 2040s; and that policymakers would focus more on energy security than sustainability in their decision-making in the short term.
But DNV also warned that, despite it being the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement next month, many governments now do not see climate action at their top priority. It saw five political trends that are now driving the energy transition:
The world has moved on after the Paris Agreement. That is to be expected given that we have seen changes that would then have seemed unlikely, including Donald Trump becoming US president, Russia launching a full assault on Ukraine, and a global pandemic that had us all working at home for two years.
Despite all those major changes, the deal itself has remained intact. In an era of rapid change, that staying power should count as a success.
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