From Kyoto to COP31: Thirty years of climate negotiations, countless promises, and a planet that keeps getting warmer.
In December 2015, nearly 200 countries gathered in Paris and made a historic promise: to keep global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.
After more than twenty years of international negotiations, political disagreements and repeated setbacks, the Paris Agreement was celebrated as a turning point in global climate cooperation.
Fast forward to 2026. The world is preparing for its 31st Conference of the Parties (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye. Global temperatures have continued to rise, and the past eleven years have been the warmest on record.
So, what happened to all those promises?
To be fair, a great deal has happened since Paris. Renewable energy has become increasingly competitive, clean energy investment has grown substantially, and countries have strengthened their climate commitments. Yet global greenhouse gas emissions remain stubbornly high, and the world is still not on track to meet the Paris temperature goals.
This is not exactly the happy ending everyone was hoping for.
To understand why, we need to go back to where it all began.
A Global Problem, but Whose Responsibility?
Climate change was already a growing scientific concern long before it became a major political issue.
Rising temperatures, melting glaciers, increasing sea levels and extreme weather events were raising questions about the future of our planet. Scientists had been warning about the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions for decades.
But climate change is not just about the environment. It is also about money.
A warming planet threatens agricultural productivity, damages infrastructure and disrupts economic activities. Reducing emissions, however, also comes at a price. It requires substantial investment, new technologies and changes to the way economies produce and consume energy.
The costs of action are often immediate. The benefits may take decades to materialise.
And there is another problem.
Greenhouse gases do not recognise national borders. Yet not every country has contributed equally to global warming, nor does every country have the same resources to address it. Developed countries have historically accounted for a large share of cumulative emissions, while many developing countries face substantial climate risks despite contributing relatively little to the problem.
Who should take the lead? Who should pay? And how much should each country sacrifice for the greater good?
These questions have haunted international climate negotiations for decades.
In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to assess the growing scientific evidence. Its first major report in 1990 helped pave the way for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted in 1992.
Three years later, the first COP meeting took place in Berlin.
The world was finally getting serious about climate change.
Or at least, that was the plan.
The Long and Winding Road to Paris
Kyoto: The First Big Promise
The first major breakthrough arrived in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.
At COP3, developed countries agreed to legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under what became known as the Kyoto Protocol. Participating developed countries committed to reducing their collective emissions by an average of at least 5% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
For the first time, international climate cooperation had moved beyond good intentions to measurable obligations.
It certainly looked promising on paper.
But the trouble began almost immediately.
The United States, one of the world’s largest emitters, signed but never ratified the Protocol. China and other developing countries were not required to meet binding emission reduction targets under the original agreement. Meanwhile, disagreements over economic competitiveness and national responsibilities complicated negotiations.
It took more than seven years for the Kyoto Protocol to enter into force in February 2005.
Seven years to put an agreement into action. And that was before the difficult part of actually reducing emissions.
Kyoto was undoubtedly a milestone. But it also exposed a fundamental weakness in international cooperation: almost everyone wanted a solution, but not everyone wanted to pay for it.
Copenhagen: High Hopes, Bitter Disappointment
By 2009, the world was ready for another big climate deal.
COP15 in Copenhagen was supposed to deliver a comprehensive agreement to take international climate cooperation beyond Kyoto’s first commitment period.
Expectations could hardly have been higher. World leaders descended on Copenhagen, and the meeting attracted enormous political and media attention.
What followed was considerably less impressive.
Negotiations became bogged down in disputes over emission reduction targets, climate finance and the responsibilities of developed and developing countries.
Instead of the legally binding agreement that many had hoped for, countries walked away with the Copenhagen Accord, a political arrangement largely based on voluntary commitments.
Not quite the grand breakthrough everyone had anticipated.
Still, Copenhagen was not a complete waste of time. The Accord recognised the scientific case for limiting global temperature increases to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, an objective that would later become central to the Paris Agreement.
In the years that followed, negotiations continued in Cancun, Durban and Doha. New arrangements were established to support climate finance and clean technology, while the Kyoto Protocol was extended into a second commitment period.
Progress was slow, but the international negotiations continued.
By 2015, the world was ready to try again.
Paris: The Devil Is in the Details
In December 2015, the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21.
This time, the celebrations were justified.
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which imposed binding emission reduction targets primarily on developed countries, the Paris Agreement brought almost every country into a common framework.
Each participating country would put forward its own climate action plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), and update it every five years with progressively greater ambition.
The Agreement also established the now-famous temperature goals: keeping global warming well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
It entered into force on 4 November 2016, less than a year after its adoption. Compared with Kyoto’s seven-year journey, Paris moved at remarkable speed.
But there was a catch.
While the Agreement is a legally binding international treaty, individual countries are not legally required to achieve the exact emission reduction targets they set for themselves.
They are required to prepare, communicate and maintain their climate commitments. Whether those commitments are actually delivered is another matter.
This was a deliberate political compromise designed to encourage broad participation, including countries that might otherwise have refused to accept binding emission reduction targets.
In that sense, Paris was both ambitious and pragmatic.
Countries finally agreed on where they wanted to go, but each was largely left to decide how to get there.
Whether that would be enough to keep global warming under control was a much bigger question.
Ten Years Later: More Promises, More Problems
The Paris Agreement was not the end of international climate negotiations. Far from it.
Over the following decade, COP meetings continued to produce new commitments, new targets and, inevitably, new controversies.
At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed for the first time in a COP decision to phase down unabated coal power. The original proposal had called for a phaseout, but the wording was weakened to phasedown in the final stages of negotiations.
One word made a considerable difference.
At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund to support developing countries particularly vulnerable to climate change.
Then came COP28 in Dubai in 2023. For the first time, countries agreed to language calling for a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
It was a remarkable development, not least because it took almost three decades of climate negotiations to arrive at such an explicit acknowledgement of the central role of fossil fuels.
At COP29 in Baku, attention turned towards money again. Developed countries agreed to take the lead in mobilising at least US$300 billion annually for developing countries by 2035, although the amount fell well short of what many developing countries had been demanding.
And at COP30 in Belém in 2025, countries once again struggled to agree on how to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Despite progress on adaptation and financial support, a formal fossil fuel transition roadmap was left out of the final negotiated outcome.
Three decades of COP meetings, and the same disagreements kept coming back.
Yet it would be unfair to suggest that nothing has changed.
The economics of clean energy have transformed considerably since Kyoto. Solar and wind power have become competitive sources of electricity in many markets. Battery storage is playing an increasingly important role in electricity systems, while electric vehicles are changing the transport sector.
The energy transition is no longer just an environmental ambition. It is becoming an economic reality.
But that transition brings challenges of its own. More renewable energy requires investment in transmission networks, storage and electricity system flexibility. The retirement of coal-fired power stations raises questions about reliability and energy security, while the costs and benefits of the transition are not necessarily shared equally.
These are complicated problems, and signing another international agreement will not make them disappear.
COP31: The Heat Is Still On
In November 2026, world leaders and climate negotiators will gather again, this time in Antalya, Türkiye.
COP31 will take place under an unusual arrangement, with Türkiye hosting and presiding over the conference while Australia chairs the negotiations, working closely with Pacific countries.
There will undoubtedly be plenty to discuss. But the numbers are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
In 2015, countries agreed to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Less than a decade later, the world recorded its first calendar year above that threshold. In 2024, global temperatures averaged approximately 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.
Does this mean we have already missed the Paris target?
Not quite.
The Paris Agreement concerns long-term global warming, not the temperature recorded in any single year. Natural climate variability can temporarily push annual temperatures above or below the underlying warming trend.
But there is little comfort in that distinction when the planet continues to warm.
Recent assessments suggest that sustained warming could reach 1.5°C around the end of this decade. Meanwhile, existing climate commitments remain insufficient to keep long-term warming within the Paris temperature goals.
The world has spent more than thirty years negotiating how to limit global warming. The planet, meanwhile, has not been waiting for us.
Against this backdrop, COP31 faces the familiar challenge of balancing emission reduction ambitions with energy affordability, reliability, economic development and geopolitical uncertainty.
The effectiveness of the negotiations will ultimately depend on what happens beyond the conference rooms.
Because climate change does not care how many agreements have been signed or how many world leaders have shaken hands in front of the cameras.
It responds to the greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
Still a Work in Progress
The history of international climate negotiations is a fascinating story of political ambitions, economic conflicts, remarkable breakthroughs and, of course, repeated disappointments.
To be fair, the world has come a long way since the first COP meeting in Berlin in 1995. Climate change has moved from the margins of international politics to the centre of government policies, investment decisions and technological development.
But there is still a considerable distance between what countries have promised and what the world has achieved.
The Paris Agreement succeeded in bringing almost every country together around a shared goal. That was no small achievement. Yet it left much of the difficult work to individual governments, businesses and the people who would ultimately bear the costs of the transition.
It was a historic breakthrough. It was never a magic solution.
The world has become remarkably good at setting climate targets. Meeting them is another matter.
The road to Paris was long.
The road beyond Paris might be even longer. ▲
