salient features of paris agreement
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The Paris Agreement (French: Accord de Paris)[3] is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, signed in 2016. The agreement's language was negotiated by representatives of 196 state parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Le Bourget, near Paris, France, and adopted by consensus on 12 December 2015.[4][5] As of March 2019, 195 UNFCCC members have signed the agreement, and 186 have become party to it.[1] The Paris Agreement's long-term goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, since this would substantially reduce the risks and effects of climate change.
Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming.[6] No mechanism forces[7] a country to set a specific target by a specific date,[8] but each target should go beyond previously set targets. In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement. Under the agreement, the earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly before the end of President Trump's current term. In practice, changes in United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already been put in place.[9][10]
In July 2017 French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot announced a plan to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles in France by 2040 as part of the Paris Agreement. Hulot also stated that France would no longer use coal to produce electricity after 2022 and that up to €4 billion will be invested in boosting energy efficiency.[11] To reach the agreement's emission targets, Norway will ban the sale of petrol and diesel-powered cars by 2025;[12] the Netherlands will do the same by 2030.[13] Electric trains running on the Dutch national rail network are already entirely powered by wind energy.[14] The House of Representatives of the Netherlands passed a bill in June 2018 mandating that by 2050 the Netherlands will cut its 1990 greenhouse-gas emissions level by 95 %—exceeding the Paris Agreement goals.[15]