Paris Agreement, 2015. The most important global agreement to date, the Paris Agreement, obliges all countries to make commitments to reduce emissions. Governments set targets known as national contributions, with a view to preventing the average global temperature from rising by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to strive to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also aims to achieve zero net emissions globally, where the amount of greenhouse gases emitted is equivalent to the amount removed from the atmosphere in the second half of the century. (This is also called climate neutral or carbon neutral.) Third, it will be easier to focus on policies that actually work to identify areas where countries need to cooperate more. Good candidates include measures to reduce the cost of renewable and efficient energy technologies; efforts to curb deforestation (such as those related to the palm oil industry); and ways to control soot particles and short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane. By focusing on these successes, governments, businesses and other stakeholders will benefit more from participation in the Paris Agreement. This approach begins with a tenuous consensus among an open group of founding participants motivated to act. A precise definition of problems, let alone the best way to address them, is not known from the beginning, but there is sufficient consensus on how to start.

The Montreal Protocol, on the other hand, was based on an initial agreement that ozone depletion is a problem that must be stopped and that a first step would require half of the most widely used SDO by 1998. At the time, there was no agreement on the magnitude of the risk, the feasibility of finding certain substitutes at certain times, or even whether 50% of reductions was the right goal. However, consensus is building with efforts and new knowledge showing what we need and which actors are capable and trustworthy. Participation is open, in the sense that new players are invited outside the founders` circle, as their experience and expertise become relevant to solving fundamental problems. Every five years, countries should assess their progress in implementing the agreement in a process known as a global balance sheet; the first is scheduled for 2023. Countries set their own targets and there is no implementation mechanism to ensure that they achieve these goals. The division of the world into developed and developing countries – a concept enshrined in the 1992 Framework Convention and a regular part of most modern global environmental agreements – casts a shadow over almost every discussion in Paris, as developing countries are determined to pay most of the costs to developed countries. But flexible promises meant that nations on both sides of the Paris ditch could take action without sacrificing the symbolic necessity of pretending that the light line created in 1992 had not been tempered. In reality, the world has moved.

The emergence of fast-growing middle-income countries – such as China, Brazil and Korea – has changed the facts on the ground. Slowly, the climate diplomacy of this reality has awakened. It`s not true. In 2009, the most advanced countries (including China) pledged $100 billion in new resources annually to much less developed countries during the Copenhagen climate talks. The $100 billion should never go entirely through the Green Climate Fund, a financing mechanism created to support the Paris agreement and located in South Korea, a close ally of the United States. Much of the $100 billion is expected to come from private sector investment, much of which is already underway due to the creation of clean energy markets.