Paris, Ten Years On: A Compass for a Faltering Decade

Hugo Pascal and Vasile Rotaru – Editors-in-chief, RED

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the numbers leave no room for illusion. The year 2024 was the hottest ever recorded, and the first to surpass, on average, +1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. 2025 has continued the trend, with abnormally warm oceans and record-breaking summers across southern Europe. The curves are no longer abstractions but scars: blackened forests, overheated seas, suffocating cities. What was once a statistical projection has become a tangible, almost intimate experience. Climate change is no longer a prospect; it is now the framework within which all public policy must operate.

Paradoxically, just as the crisis has become undeniable, its political centrality has diminished. In the United States, the 2024 election was followed by a dramatic reversal: a notice of withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was issued on January 20, 2025, and a sweeping regulatory rollback began, targeting the legal foundations of federal climate policy—including a proposal to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the very act that recognized greenhouse emissions as a threat to public health. Simultaneously, the EPA began stripping GHG standards from vehicle regulations. These developments unfold within a jurisprudential context that constrains agency action. In 2022, West Virginia v. EPA expanded the reach of the major questions doctrine, and in 2024, Loper Bright overturned Chevron, curtailing judicial deference to expert administrative interpretations absent explicit congressional authorization. Administrative law—once a discreet instrument of transition—has become an obstacle.

Europe, meanwhile, hesitates and stumbles. Emmanuel Macron’s call for a “pause” in environmental regulation carried more than symbolic weight—it gave shape to the overall political fatigue. Euro 7 automotive standards have been diluted, the 2035 targets postponed to future negotiations, and national capitals now speak more of competitiveness than sustainability. The European Commission still calls for a 90% cut in net emissions by 2040, yet member states are already retreating. What once looked like a voluntary race has turned into a reluctant journey. Hans Jonas argued in his book The Imperative of Responsibility that the power to act creates a new obligation towards future generations. We are seeing the opposite: the power to delay, to procrastinate, to put off until tomorrow what should be done today. Politicians are choosing to pause, while the climate is only accelerating.

In this climate of wavering political will, courts have emerged as the metronome of the Paris Agreement. The European trajectory has taken shape through successive rulings. Urgenda Foundation v State of the Netherlands (Supreme Court of the Netherlands, 20 December 2019) compelled the Dutch state to cut emissions by at least 25% by 2020 under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Neubauer v Germany (German Federal Constitutional Court, 24 March 2021) constitutionalized intergenerational equity. In France, the Commune de Grande-Synthe saga (Conseil d’État, 1 July 2021 & 10 May 2023) inaugurated continuous judicial monitoring of the government’s trajectory and its short-term corrective actions. And in April 2024, the European Court of Human Rights marked a turning point: in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland (ECtHR, 9 April 2024), the Grand Chamber recognized a right to effective protection against the serious effects of climate change under Article 8, and condemned policy insufficiency. This hybrid jurisprudence—merging fundamental rights with positive obligations—places climate at the core of Europe’s rule-of-law litigation.

International law, too, has grown more encompassing. On 21 May 2024, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea held that greenhouse gas emissions constitute marine pollution and required states to take all necessary measures based on the best available science. Two months later, on 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion: states have a legal duty to protect the climate system, to cooperate, and to regulate emissions, including those from private actors; failure to do so may entail liability and reparations. Without creating a new global climate judge, the ICJ has laid the normative groundwork that already anchors national and regional litigation. The judiciary—never meant to govern—has become a tenacious watchdog, a silent compass at the heart of the storm.

At the same time, deregulation is reshaping the economics of private environmental commitments. In June 2025, the EU put the Green Claims Directive—designed to standardize and verify corporate environmental assertions—on hold. The European Commission also proposed narrowing the scope of sustainability reporting, exempting a large share of companies. True, ISSB (IFRS S2) reporting has gathered momentum since 2024, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (2024/1760) is being phased in. Yet the overall framework remains asymmetrical: disclosure obligations are tightening even as uncertainty grows over the enforceability of voluntary commitments.

What does this decade reveal? First, the Paris Agreement has succeeded in universalizing metrics—emission inventories, assessments, and trajectories—mobilizing markets, and creating a shared language for climate-focused policy. Second, political erosion, through regulatory dismantling in the United States and defensive compromises in Europe, now threatens the shift from language to action. Finally, judges—national, European, and international—have become the central actors, keeping ambition alive as political commitments shrivel.

Should we rejoice? Judges are not social planners, and no court order can substitute for policymaking. The transition demands credible industrial strategies, an investing state, price signals consistent with social justice, and stable rules for capital. To prevent climate litigation from descending into a litigation of impotence, governments must re-internalize the ambition set by judges—translating it into binding carbon budgets, quantifiable sectoral pathways, and verifiable investment schedules.

We are living in a suspended moment of unfulfilled promise. In 2015, the world believed it had found a shared purpose—a way to treat climate change not as a domestic issue but as a collective one. There was an illusion of unity, as if nations could still, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “act in concert” to give substance to the common good. While politics has chosen to pause, the law advances: through judgments and advisory opinions, it tightens the grip of legal commitments. Europe must now decide whether this movement remains curative—limited to sanctions—or becomes preventive, through legal planning. Otherwise, the center of gravity of climate action will drift further toward the courts, reducing this decisive decade to a judicial chronicle of feebleness. The Paris Agreement provided the grammar; the syntax of implementation remains to be created. For now, it is the judge who holds the pen.