US withdraws from UN climate agreement, many other climate organisations

The United States has pulled out of the UNFCCC and dozens of key global climate bodies, becoming the first nation to leave the 1992 climate convention. (AP/PTI Photo)

In an unprecedented move, the United States on Thursday withdrew itself from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the overarching 1992 international agreement that lays down the basic rules and principles to deal with the problem of climate change. The United States is the first and the only country to pull out of this agreement, which counts every other country in the world as its member.

The UNFCCC was just one of the as many as 66 international agreements and organisations that the United States withdrew from on Thursday saying they “no longer serve American interests”.

It included a host of climate-related entities like Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), International Solar Alliance (ISA), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and UN Oceans.

“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The United States had withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Agreement immediately after Donald Trump took over as President for the second term last year.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.

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. They have a relationship similar to the one between and Constitution and individual laws made under that Constitution.

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).