Extract from ABC News
It is 10 years since the world got together in Paris to agree on climate action. What has changed? (Li Genxing)
Ten years ago, shortly after Malcolm Turnbull toppled Tony Abbott to become prime minister and just weeks after the deadly Paris terror attacks, something momentous happened.
Scientists, diplomats and world leaders converged in the northern suburbs of Le Bourget, as the city and country still mourned, to hash out a plan to save the planet.
It was dubbed simply 'the Paris Agreement', signed by 195 countries it was the first truly global agreement to avert the catastrophic warming of the planet caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
"It was euphoric," says Erwin Jackson, one of Australia's most respected climate policy experts and Head of Australian Programs at Monash University's Climateworks Centre.
"For the first time, all countries across the world had come together to agree on a new path forward on climate action for the world.
"And critically, it wasn't just governments; it was business, it was investors, it was unions and civil society all getting behind it."
World leaders celebrate the climate pact 15 years in the making. (Reuters: Stephane Mahe)
It was an agreement at least 15 years in the making, with prior negotiations more piecemeal, and it was more ambitious than many, including Jackson, had expected.
"We had three scenarios for what Paris could look like, and we had one called Vive la Paris — and that's the one we got," he says.
"That was really a result of very large countries like the United States coming together with the most vulnerable countries, like those in the Pacific, to forge an agreement across those countries who wanted to actually solve the climate crisis and forced recalcitrant countries basically into line."
Then, US president Barack Obama was a driving force in reaching such an ambitious plan, calling it "the best chance we have to save the one planet we've got".
It remains one of Obama's proudest achievements, despite his successor Donald Trump, pulling out of the agreement — twice.
A decade on from that euphoric moment, what has the Paris Agreement achieved and has it lived up to its promise?
Heating up, slowing down
It has succeeded in one crucial respect: it changed the trajectory of global warming.
In 2015, the world was on track for up to 4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
Today, projections hover between 2.3C and 2.8C — still dangerously high, but a marked improvement.
While fossil fuel emissions haven't increased at the astronomical pace of the past century, they haven't started to fall either.
The overarching goal of Paris is to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels" and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C.
But the goal of 1.5C is likely to be breached in the next decade, according to the latest UN Emissions Gap Report released last week.
"Scientists tell us that a temporary overshoot above 1.5C is now inevitable — starting, at the latest, in the early 2030s," UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says.
"And the path to a liveable future gets steeper by the day, but this is no reason to surrender.
"It's a reason to step up and speed up.
"1.5C by the end of the century remains our North Star."
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was in Paris for the history-making COP, says while the agreement hasn't lived up to its promise, he remains optimistic.
"We haven't been able to cut emissions to keep warming to 2C, let alone to 1.5C," he says.
"Would we have been worse off if Paris had not been agreed to? Yes, we would be a lot worse off."
Malcolm Turnbull with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (L), French president Francois Hollande and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff at COP21. (Ian Langsdon/AFP)
Getting China on board
Six years before, in Copenhagen, at the same annual global meeting on climate change known as the COP, a very different story took place.
Negotiations fell into disarray, no global agreement could be reached, and the talks were considered a failure.
"I think there was also a determination not to have the sort of catastrophe that they had had at Copenhagen," Turnbull says.
"That was a sort of a train wreck of a COP, but [in Paris] there was a real sense of optimism."
But Obama learnt a critical lesson from that failure; he needed to get China on board.
"We figured if we could get China on board, then you now had the two largest emitters — the United States and China, a traditionally wealthy country and a country that is still developing — if we got both those countries on board, then we could bring on others," Obama wrote five years after the agreement was signed.
"A testimony to, I think, its resilience was the fact that my successor in the White House decided unilaterally to pull out of the Paris Accords. And yet, despite what could have been a huge symbolic blow that collapsed the entire agreement, every other country in the world stuck with it."
Then US president Barack Obama was a driving force in reaching an agreement.
Turnbull says China was a critical piece of the puzzle, not just because they're one of the largest emitters.
"China was probably the most important country at that meeting, and it was not fully appreciated then how important they were," he says.
"What was not fully appreciated then was how critically important China was in developing the technologies that would enable us to meet the challenge."
In the ten years since Paris, China has been the leading player in bringing down the cost of solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles.
"The vast industrial efficiency of the Chinese manufacturing system has resulted in clean energy technologies becoming much cheaper than they had been hitherto and available to the whole world," Turnbull says.
"In terms of climate, the essential nation is now China, and not just because they're a big economy and a big emitter and the largest emitter.
"But because they are making the bulk of the world's clean energy technology now."
A worker carries out maintenance work on wind turbines at a wind farm on East Lvhua Island in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. (Getty Images: VCG)
Renewables exceed expectations
One of the big success stories of the last decade has been the astronomical rise of renewable energy, far outpacing the forecasts predicted back in 2015.
Solar capacity is being installed at 15 times the rate of what was predicted by the International Energy Agency back then.
Renewable energy now makes up 40 per cent of global electricity generation — also exceeding expectations.
"The cost of solar generation per watt has come down by more than 90 per cent," Turnbull says.
"When I was Howard's environment minister in 2007, the question was — how much extra are we prepared to pay to save the planet?
"That is no longer the case."
Global investment in renewable energy overtook fossil fuels back in 2016 and now outstrips it at a rate of 2 to 1.
"I think the other big success story in Paris is not just on what governments do, it's really what it has sparked across global capital markets," Jackson says.
"The direction of travel is only going one way and that's towards net zero and while there were always laggards and leaders across the business and investment community, the direction of travel is clear."
But alongside the growth of renewable energy, our overall consumption of electricity has also grown — so while the percentage of fossil fuel generation is decreasing, emissions remain stubbornly high.
"We're in this funny period, really, where renewables are now attracting more investment in the global energy system than fossil fuels," Jackson says.
"We have a whole bunch of legacy fossil fuels and, in some cases, additional investments in fossil fuels.
"But if you think of the structural change that's occurring within the economy over a long period of time, the global economy, we're at a point now where global emissions are probably going to stabilise pretty close to where they are and start to fall quite rapidly over the next few years."
A decade of disasters
As the cost of renewables has come down, economic losses from natural disasters have been rising.
Globally, economic losses from natural catastrophes reached $417 billion in 2024, with insured losses hitting a record $154 billion.
Floods, storms, and wildfires are striking more frequently and with greater intensity, pushing the limits of recovery systems and insurance markets.
The Valencia region of Spain, which got more than a year's worth of rain in just eight hours in October last year. (Alberto Saiz, AP Photo)
At the same time, attribution science has advanced dramatically, improving our understanding of how human activity influences extreme weather.
Scientists can now rapidly quantify how climate change has impacted the intensity and likelihood of an extreme event occurring.
Last year was the warmest year on record, for the first time reaching 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a full calendar year.
The five-year average now stands at 1.35C, having warmed by 0.3C in the last decade alone.
"Even if the difference between 15.3C and 16.6C, feels negligible when you step outside," says climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto from the Imperial College of London.
"The difference between 1.3C of global warming and 2.6C is the difference between life and death for thousands of people, and of course, also ecosystems."
According to a report by Climate Central, nearly every country has seen an increase in the number of hot days in the last decade, compared to the decade before the Paris Agreement.
"An estimated 16,600 people lost their lives across European cities during the summer of 2025 alone as a result of increased temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels," the report states.
"Despite these visible and escalating hazards and risks, governments and industries continue to invest in fossil fuels, with CO₂ emissions reaching an all-time high in 2023 and again in 2024."
NDCs banking on trees — what even is net zero?
The backbone of the Paris Agreement was the creation of a system that requires countries to pledge increasingly ambitious climate targets — called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs — every five years.
The target that Malcolm Turnbull took to Paris in 2015 was 26 to 28 per cent emissions reductions by 2030.
In 2020, under prime minister Scott Morrison that target remained the same.
But after Labor won the 2022 federal election, they increased their ambitions outside of the five-yearly cycle to 43 per cent by 2030, and most recently, a 62–70 per cent cut by 2035.
But there's a discrepancy between what countries have promised to do and what is actually required.
"Where it's not living up, is the level of commitments that we're getting, [they] are not in line with the ultimate objectives of the agreement, which are to limit warming to 1.5 to well below 2C," Jackson says.
There is also an over-reliance on using carbon removal through land use, such as large-scale tree planting and forest restoration.
Last year's Land Gap report has calculated that global climate pledges would require almost 1 billion hectares of land to fulfil their goals — an area larger than the size of Australia.
"Country climate pledges reveal unrealistic expectations for land-use change. Some high-income, major emitters account for nearly all land-based carbon dioxide removal in climate pledges," the 2024 report states.
"This increases the risk of overshooting warming thresholds and of dangerous climate impacts. The legitimacy of net zero climate goals is dependent on rapid decarbonisation rather than over-relying on removals, particularly from land."
The term net zero has become part of the lexicon since Paris, but sometimes its meaning gets lost in the politicking over climate.
Essentially, it means that the world needs to emit fewer carbon emissions than can be absorbed by the atmosphere.
"If you're going to stabilise the climate at any level, you have to achieve net zero emissions," Jackson says.
"It is impossible even to stabilise the world's climate at 4C unless you achieve net zero at some point.
"It's a scientific imperative. I think all of us have a role in actually also articulating what a well-planned transition to net zero by 2050 looks like and I think there is confusion in the Australian community about what that means."
What's the verdict?
Global emissions are still rising, the world's climate is becoming increasingly unstable as the goal of 1.5C slips out of reach but the Paris Agreement remains a critical juncture in climate diplomacy.
It marked a turning point for growth and investment in renewable energy and has given the world a framework to do more.
In Australia, the decade since Paris has been marked by political whiplash, devastating disasters, and rising insurance costs.
Yet it's also seen a surge in renewables, stronger targets, and a growing understanding that climate change is already impacting peoples lives and livelihoods.
"Forty years ago when I started working on this issue, we were heading — towards 5 to 6C of warming," Jackson says.
"Now we're heading more likely to somewhere between 2 — 2.5C."
For Jackson, Paris remains a pivotal moment, but it's not a panacea to save the world.
People demonstrate in front of a replica of the Eiffel Tower at the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 9, 2015. (Reuters: Stephane Mahe)
"It's not international agreements that reduce emissions and they don't make communities safer from climate change through adaptation.
"What they do is set global norms, and then it's up to national governments to act on those norms."
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