The Road to Paris

To many extents, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change represents the culmination of a 25-year diplomatic debate involving a multitude of stakeholders, including policy makers, scholars, and a plethora of different interest groups. At the same time, the Paris Agreement embodies the foundation of a global transformation that can lead to the establishment of a low-carbon society and economy worldwide by the end of this century. Understanding how such utopic ambition has been codified and ratified in an international treaty and whether the treaty can trigger low-carbon transformation processes requires first of all an understanding of its history. By providing a summary of the key events that characterised the 25-year pathway that led to the Paris Agreement, this chapter offers the information required to understand the Agreement’s ambition. The description of the negotiation process since 1992 sheds light on the dramatic shifts of power that shaped its evolution. The Chapter concludes with a detailed description of the Paris Agreement, its content, its achievements, as well as its most significant unsolved issues.