The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries in Paris in December 2015. It entered into force on November 4, 2016, having achieved the required ratification by at least 55 Parties to the Convention accounting in total for at least an estimated 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Paris Agreement is the world's first comprehensive climate agreement, and has the central aim of strengthening the response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2°C compared to preindustrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. The agreement also aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change and provides a mechanism for each country to define its targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions (nationally defined contributions, NDCs). In 2018, signatories will take stock of their progress, with similar stock takes every five years.