US withdraws from UN climate agreement, many other climate organisations

“This follows a review ordered earlier this year of all international intergovernmental organisations, conventions, and treaties that the United States is a member of or party to, or that the United States funds or supports,” a statement from the US White House said.

“These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over US priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that US taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions,” it said.

The United States had withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Agreement immediately after Donald Trump took over as President for the second term last year. He had pulled out from the Paris Agreement in his first term as well, but his successor Joe Biden had got the US back into the Paris Agreement.

Thursday’s withdrawals mark a complete disengagement of the United States from international climate action, and is a setback to the global fight against climate change.

“It just goes on to show that the United States does not care. It is still the world’s largest historical emitter, it never fulfilled any of its responsibilities in the climate agreements, and now it is comfortably walking out of it, without any repercussions. This breaks the principles on which the global climate architecture was erected,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, a former lead climate negotiator for India, and now a distinguished fellow with Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

The UNFCCC is the foundational international agreement on climate change, the one that acknowledged the problem and laid down the basic principles on how to tackle this problem. The 2015 Paris Agreement, and 1997 Kyoto Protocol before that, are instruments of the UNFCCC, which guide global action on climate. The UNFCCC is like the Constitution, and the Paris Agreement and Kyoto Protocol, like individual laws made under that Constitution.

Withdrawal from the UNFCCC would have ensured an automatic exit from the Paris Agreement as well, but Trump signed out from Paris Agreement first and then from UNFCCC a year later.

R R Rashmi, another former lead climate negotiator for India, and now a Distinguished Fellow with Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute, said the US decision, though not unexpected, could further weaken multilateral decision-making on climate change.

“The US decision is a further setback to the multilateral process on climate change, which has already been under strain. There might be limited impacts in the immediate future, but over a longer term, and particularly for countries like India, investments in clean energy sector might get impacted. What is more worrying is that weakening of multilateral structures might result in an increase in aggressive bilateral mechanisms, like the CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism introduced by the European Union) being instituted. In the absence of multilateral forums, countries like India would have to deal with them entirely on their own strength,” Rashmi said.

Trump has been a climate denialist, and has taken a series of decisions, particularly in the last one year, that seriously undermines years of work done in climate action, not just in the United States but globally. The US withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, can have a major impact on the science and knowledge of climate change. IPCC is a global body of scientists that periodically make an assessment of the state of climate by going through all the research material that has been produced on the subject. Scientists from the United States have been an integral part of this process, which has produced six comprehensive assessment reports till now.

In the past one year, Trump administration has also been scaling down funding and manpower allocations in key scientific organisations that engage in climate research, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).