US Exit from Paris Agreement Deepens Climate Vulnerability Worldwide
HAVANA TIMES – On January 27, the United States officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty adopted in 2015 aiming to reduce global warming and strengthen countries’ resilience to climate impacts. Following a year of regulatory rollbacks and sustained efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle federal climate policy, this move is expected to trigger wide ranging ripple effects—undermining international efforts to curb climate change, accelerating environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, and increasing risks to human health, safety, and long-term development.
Since its adoption, the Paris Agreement has been instrumental to global climate action initiatives—mobilizing countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, expand renewable energy, strengthen climate adaptation, and protect vulnerable communities. The agreement requires member states to regularly update their emissions-reduction targets and submit plans for achieving them, serving as a vital framework for sustaining collective progress and maintaining transparent communication among nations.
Amnesty International warns that these actions by the Trump administration risk defunding “key multilateral and bilateral climate institutions and programming,” a shift that would have significant repercussions for not only the United States but for the broader international community. The organization warns that US funding for United Nations (UN) agencies is expected to cease imminently, which would halt lifesaving support for climate-sensitive communities and disrupt critical climate monitoring and mitigation efforts.
Specifically, the US withdrawal is expected to undermine global efforts to address climate-induced displacement, disaster recovery, and infrastructure rebuilding. Communities in developing countries are projected to bear the heaviest burdens, as reduced support will leave them more vulnerable to escalating climate-driven losses.
Before the withdrawal, the UN was already grappling with a severe funding crisis – one made worse by the US’s refusal to pay its assessed contributions to the regular budget and its sharp cuts to foreign assistance. The US has also withdrawn from the board of the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), a crucial mechanism supporting vulnerable communities facing climate-driven disasters. Its previously pledged USD 17.5 million remains uncertain, raising further concerns about the fund’s ability to operate effectively.
With this move, the United States becomes the only nation to exit the agreement in history, joining Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the few states not party to it. With the US being a major global actor in climate change negotiations, the withdrawal risks reducing diplomatic pressure on other wealthy nations to scale up contributions.
“The US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement sets a disturbing precedent that seeks to instigate a race to the bottom, and, along with its withdrawal from other major global climate pacts, aims to dismantle the global system of cooperation on climate action,” said Marta Schaaf, Amnesty International’s Programme Director for Climate, ESJ and Corporate Accountability.
“The US is one of several powerful anti-climate actors but as an influential superpower, this decision, along with acts of coercion and bullying of other countries and powerful actors to double down on fossil fuels, causes particular harm and threatens to reverse more than a decade of global climate progress under the agreement,” she added.
“For us, the fight against climate change continues. The fight for a just transition continues. The fight to get more resources for climate mitigation and adaptation, especially for those most vulnerable countries continues and our efforts will not waver in that part,” said UN Spokesperson to the Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric.
On January 22, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its annual State of Finance for Nature report, which monitors global finance flows toward nature-based solutions. The report found that investments in activities that harm the climate are roughly 30 times the investments for ecosystem conservation and restoration.
According to figures from UNEP, the private sector makes up approximately 70 percent of global financing that harms the environment, only giving back 10 percent of funding that works to protect it. In 2023, roughly USD 7.3 trillion was invested into global activities that harmed the environment, with USD 4.9 trillion coming from private sectors and USD 2.4 trillion coming from the public sectors, which aim to maximize support for fossil fuel usage, agriculture, water, transport, and construction.
This, compounded with President Donald Trump’s renewed “drill, baby, drill” policy, is expected to further destabilize global climate efforts by accelerating fossil fuel dependence, undermining emissions-reduction targets, and widening the financial gap for urgent climate adaptation and ecosystem restoration.
Jeremy Wallace, a professor of China studies at John Hopkins University, told reporters that the U.S.’s expanding reliance on fossil fuels sends a signal to the international community that scaling back climate ambition is acceptable. This risks encouraging other major emitters to pursue weaker energy transitions and less lofty emissions-targets.
China, for instance, recently pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only 7-10 percent over the next decade, a target that has been widely criticized by climate experts as unambitious and insufficient to meet global emissions-targets.
“If the domestic market in the US continues to be dominated by fossil fuels through the fiat of an authoritarian government, that will continue to have an impact on the rest of the world,” said Basav Sen, climate justice project director at Institute for Policy Studies. “It will be that much harder for low-income countries, who are very dependent on fossil fuel production and exports, to be able to make their transitions with the US saying that we won’t fund any of it.”
I have been an ESG researcher for a decade. Doing research around the world At first I was a gung-ho proponent of environmentalism hoping to make a difference. But after a decade of seeing narratives twisted by environmental rating agencies, lobby groups, and governments, to suite their own agendas I am no longer a proponent of radical environmentalism or of ESG principles. I will provide some reasons for my change of ideals.
Firstly, why should U.S taxpayer dollars pay for other countries “transitions,” in all its forms? China is by far the largest producer of greenhouse gasses on the planet. But no one is demanding China pay for their transition away from using fossil fuels.
Secondly, the global energy-related emissions in 2015 were approximately 32.1 billion tonnes, and total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fuel combustion were 35,559 MtCO2. And despite the fear mongering rhetoric of the twisted ideological environmental stalwarts with statements like, “The US is one of several powerful anti-climate actors but as an influential superpower, this decision, along with acts of coercion and bullying of other countries and powerful actors to double down on fossil fuels, causes particular harm and threatens to reverse more than a decade of global climate progress under the agreement,” the reality is that this is an ironic and misleading statement of propaganda, as there hasn’t been any “global climate progress” to be reversed in the past decade: as by 2025 (a decade later), global fossil fuel (CO2) emissions in 2025 reached 38.1 billion tonnes, and total global CO2 emissions reached 42.2 GtCO2. So despite the rhetoric, production and trade policies, and terribly strenuous extra environmental taxes paid by tax payers globally, greenhouse gasses continue to rise, spurred by the likes of China who historically have added a new coal fired power plant every single day to their electricity grid. So I ask, “where is this so called global climate progress?”
Thirdly, ESG standards boards and rating agencies continue peddling their way the best way to combat climate change. It’s all a rouse designed to extract resources, through fees and charges, away from the economy while adding absolutely nothing productive back into the economic systems that keep us going. There are so many standards and rating agencies out there now that the entire environmental edifice is now known as a vegetable soup of confusing and onerous (and resource sucking) mix of a confusing waste of time and money. Rating agencies continue to award “reporting” awards to the likes of companies within the extractive sectors simply because they have fancy sustainability reports that comply with that specific agency’s reporting requirements. Now ask yourself if a mining operation, logging company, or oil company should be awarded with an environmental award? Just the idea is preposterous. Almost all of the regulatory bodies and reporting agencies are in it for themselves; as “make work” projects so they have jobs. The actual fact is nothing they are doing is combating the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. But they will never admit this fact because then they would be admitting failure and that all their efforts were a waste of time and money. This is a kin to one years’ last edition of a boating magazine’s (which will remain nameless) editorial comment where the editor admitted that “boating was a waste of time and money.” That comment may have been his last for the magazine but at least it was honest, and brave; unlike what exists in any other environmental agencies, regulatory bodies, governments, or rating agencies; other than a few, like the U.S (and now myself) who are environmental, and tax, fatigued.
In closing, let me add, that this same upward trend in emissions despite all the misguided efforts to curb such emissions, is exactly the same trend that is seen with child labour globally, and human trafficking, both of which have been on a steady incline as well. So let’s stop pretending that things are getting better just because the people who wish it to get better have bullhorn loudspeakers, instead of boots on the ground and fists.