Ten years ago today, world leaders met in Paris and signed one of the most ambitious global pacts of our time: the Paris Agreement, a legally binding pledge to confront the climate crisis together. Born out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and formally implemented a few months later on Earth Day 2016, the breakthrough agreement united nearly every nation in the world around a shared goal of limiting global warming well below 2°C, with efforts to keep it to 1.5°C, while strengthening adaptation and climate resiliency for communities on the frontlines.
At its core, the Paris Agreement introduced a bottom-up framework. Each country must set its own climate targets in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), or specific plans to cut emissions and invest in climate finance, updated every five years with increasing ambition over time. These plans are where the lofty goals of the Paris Agreement turn into action, creating space for every country to put in their fair share in tackling a crisis that knows no borders.
The last decade has seen an unprecedented level of international cooperation, spurring breakneck investments in clean energy and completely reshaping the global climate policy landscape. Yet emissions continue to rise and temperatures are careening well past safe thresholds, a stark reminder that progress to date leaves much more urgent work to be done.
Global Citizen has long championed this hard work, turning citizen action into real-world climate impact. As the Agreement marks its 10th anniversary, it’s an opportunity to reflect and renew our commitment to help accelerate fair, just climate action everywhere for people and planet.
The Paris Agreement’s Top Goal: Protecting Nature
One of the Paris Agreements’ most forward-looking elements was its recognition that nature is far more than just a scenery or backdrop — it is central to our planet’s survival. Critical ecosystems including forests, oceans, wetlands, and grasslands sustain biodiversity, absorb carbon, regulate temperature, nurture water cycles, and protect vulnerable communities from climate shocks. In Article 5, countries specifically committed to protect natural carbon sinks — areas which absorb more carbon than they emit — and integrate nature-based solutions into their climate plans.
That vision picked up an unprecedented amount of traction over the last 10 years. From forest protection funds to payment mechanisms that tie climate finance directly to conservation efforts, there’s been a rising wave of new policy and financial tools to take the Paris Agreement’s nature-first strategy to heart. For example, Indonesia uses REDD+ frameworks to reduce deforestation and land use emissions, rehabilitate millions of hectares of forest and peatland, and improve forest oversight in alignment with its climate goals.
It’s not just governments, though. Civil society and everyday citizens are also fueling global momentum. And Global Citizen has sought to take citizen action further. Through our campaigning efforts, and long before nature took center stage at global climate conferences in recent years, Global Citizen focused on the crucial role of safeguarding forests and ecosystems on our stages. From supporting marine protected areas around Ascension Island to amplifying environmental education initiatives to reach more than 18 million young people in India, Global Citizen has planted the seeds of public awareness when it comes to stepping up for nature. In 2021, Global Citizen also helped secure commitments from the governments of six Brazilian Amazon states to expand protected areas, strengthen adaptation programs, and set ambitious emission reduction goals.
That groundwork laid the foundation for our most ambitious initiative on behalf of nature to date: the Protect the Amazon campaign. First launched in 2024, this campaign built on the Paris Agreement’s core principle that safeguarding forests is inseparable from saving the planet. Over the course of this year-long campaign, Global Citizen mobilized action takers across the world to take the campaign mobilized 4.4 million actions demanding bold new policies and investments in the Amazon and its people. This campaign culminated at the Global Citizen Festival: Amazônia, our first-ever music festival in Latin America. There, these millions of actions helped lead to on-stage announcements by world leaders to center Indigenous leadership and local stewardship, invest in nature-based solution funds, and commit more than $1 billion towards protecting and restoring 31 million hectares of the Amazon, one of the most vital carbon sinks on Earth.
Ten Years On, Clean Energy Is Surging
One of the biggest lights sparked by the Paris Agreement has been in the development and investment in clean energy. Its core goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C makes it clear: the world must rapidly shift away from coal, oil, and gas toward cleaner power. To keep the goals of the Paris Agreement in reach requires not only cutting emissions, but fundamentally reshaping how the world produces and consumes energy, particularly wealthy nations that burn the most energy.
That transformation has now begun in earnest. In the years since the Agreement was first signed, renewable energy sources have soared, upending markets and flipping the script on old assumptions. Solar power is now the world’s cheapest energy source in history, with wind and other renewables competitive with conventional fossil fuels in many regions, signs pointing to a veritable global clean power boom that only promises to pick up speed. Renewables accounted for over 90% of new electricity capacity added in 2024. In fact, renewables overtook coal for the first time ever in 2025, a turning point that was hard to imagine a decade ago.
The clean energy transition is inevitable. Now Global Citizen is working to step on the gas pedal of that shift, starting by turning awareness into action. Global Citizen has worked hand-in-hand with governments, policy experts, private sector partners, and global initiatives like the Race to Zero campaign to help turn ambitious net-zero goals into real commitments. Spotlighting Race to Zero across festivals, digital campaigns, and in-person actions, Global Citizen has rallied both public pressure and high-level attention where it matters most, securing pledges from major corporations and dozens of sub-national governments — from the coasts of the United States all the way to Maharashtra and Asker Kommune in India.
One of Global Citizen’s biggest efforts to date in pursuit of this goal has been the Scaling Up Renewables in Africa (SURA) campaign, launched in 2024 in partnership with the European Commission and the Republic of South Africa, with policy support from the International Energy Agency. SURA set out with blazingly ambitious goals: to triple renewable energy capacity across the continent by 2030 and help close the energy poverty gap for the approximately 600 million people across Africa who live without reliable power. One year later, those ambitions bore fruit. Culminating at Global Citizen NOW: Johannesburg, held on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, SURA succeeded in putting the pressure on both public and private sector leaders to step up with a fleet of new, timebound financial and policy commitments to drive further momentum across the continent. In a moment defined by rapid population growth and intensifying climate impacts, leaders announced from the Global Citizen stage commitments that will provide electricity to over 17.5 million homes and deliver 26.8 gigawatts of renewable energy across the continent. Each megawatt represents much more than being able to flip a switch — it unlocks access to schools, powers up health clinics, and creates new economic opportunities for communities that have for too long now been left in the dark.
Complementing the Paris Agreement’s call-to-action for a clean energy future is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a framework that lays out exactly how the world can move past coal, oil and gas for good and calls on nations to end the expansion of fossil fuels, ensure economic security for workers and communities, and rapidly scale renewables. Global Citizens around the world back this plan with over 135,195 actions in support of the treaty — pressure that has been integral in getting world leaders’ attention. At the Global Citizen Festival in 2023, Antigua and Barbuda became the first country in the Caribbean to endorse the treaty, while Timor-Leste made history as the first oil-producing country to do so, marking a significant moment in the treaty’s growing diplomatic momentum. The Treaty is now backed by a growing global coalition that includes 18 countries, over 145 cities and subnational governments, institutions like the World Health Organization and the European Parliament, 101 Nobel Laureates, thousands of scientists and civil society organizations, Indigenous nations, faith leaders, and over one million individuals worldwide.
Unlocking Climate Finance: The Paris Agreement’s Greatest Promise
Throughout these campaigning efforts, one truth remains clear: climate action cannot happen without the money to pay for it. The Paris Agreement was also a promise, one to protect people and ensure no one is left behind. But today’s wealthiest nations, those with the most industrialized economies and highest rates of energy consumption, have historically contributed the most to the current crisis. But paradoxically, countries that have contributed the least, from small island nations to those on the frontlines of today’s most extreme weather disasters, are suffering the most, with potentially more than a billion people projected to be displaced by climate change by 2050. For these individuals, floods, droughts, extreme heat, and sea-level rise are existential threats to lives, livelihoods, and basic human dignity.
Adaptation remains a critically underfunded piece of the puzzle to address this issue. These projects encompass storm-resistant housing, drought-tolerant crops, reliable water systems, and strong social safety nets that are needed across the board, but especially in low-income countries, particularly in Africa, where governments struggle to pay for climate-proof infrastructure and invest in a clean energy future. In 2009, wealthy nations agreed to commit $100 billion per year to support climate action in developing countries. That pledge however was only reached for the first time in 2022, 13 years later — and even then, most of this money was lent out as loans, meaning that many vulnerable nations have been forced to take on debt to protect their citizens. Of this, only $32.4 billion was earmarked for adaptation, far below the estimated $387 billion per year needed by 2030.
COP29 in 2024 sought to reset the agenda. Leaders agreed to a New Collective Quantified Goal — or, in other words, a new global climate finance target for all countries to strive towards, as well as a plan for how, where, and when to allocate that money — of $300 billion annually by 2035, with a broader target of mobilizing $1.3 trillion per year from blending public and private money.
With this goal in mind, Global Citizen has called on wealthy nations to put money where their rhetoric is and step up for adaptation. To do this, Global Citizen works to mobilize millions of engaged action takers around the world to create clear, loud momentum for climate finance. By spotlighting the need for funding adaptation, renewable energy, and forest protection, Global Citizen amplified calls for wealthy nations to honor, match, and go beyond their Paris Agreement commitments.
Specifically, calls for concrete adaptation finance have been a front-and-center pillar of the Protect the Amazon campaign, showing leaders that citizens care about fairness, justice, and accountability. And countries have begun to step up. Norway showed what climate leadership looks like by pledging up to $3 billion at Global Citizen NOW: Rio de Janeiro to the new Tropical Forest Forever Facility, demonstrating that protecting the world’s forests, and the communities who depend on them, is not only a moral imperative, but also an investment in global stability and resilience for all.
Global Citizen has also been a vocal proponent of innovative new approaches to climate finance. As a supporter of the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, Global Citizen aims to encourage governments around the world to adopt new revenue streams by introducing new taxes on high-polluting industries, such as flying, and extremely wealthy individuals. That way, countries can find debt-free financing to directly invest in local mitigation and adaptation projects, rechanneling money away from polluters towards the public good instead. The concept of Solidarity Levies like these is directly rooted in the principle of “Common but Differentiated Responsibility,” enshrined in the Paris Agreement, which essentially means that while everyone is responsible for chipping in to the fight against climate change, how much depends on their ability to pay and historical polluting record. To date, Global Citizen has rallied over 231 civil society organizations and over 100,000 Global Citizens to call on governments to join the effort. And these efforts are paying off. In the newly-launched Premium Flyers Solidarity Coalition, eight governments are putting together plans to implement a small tax on the wealthiest fliers, which could add up to a big payout for climate action.
The Work Ahead
2025’s monumental progress shows that meaningful climate action is possible when governments, citizens, civil society, and the private sector work together to make it happen. Still, the urgency of this crisis cannot be overstated. Extreme weather events are intensifying, sea levels are rising, and millions of people, particularly in low-income and climate-vulnerable countries, are suffering the consequences. Energy inequities persist, forests continue to fall, and fossil fuels continue to burn with little regard as the 1.5°C goal slips further out of reach.
And yet, moments of hope and leadership abound. Countries like Norway, Germany, and France demonstrated that climate finance and adaptation can scale when political will is matched with the right resources. But at Global Citizen, we’re working to ensure that that’s only the beginning.
Meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals demands faster, bolder, and more coordinated action. Every year increases the toll of human and ecological devastation. The world must act now to close the gaps in climate finance, energy access, and forest protections Global Citizen, alongside our partners and powered by engaged citizens everywhere, will continue to drive this work forward, holding leaders accountable, amplifying calls to action, and ensuring that the Paris Agreement’s promises become a reality.