Remarks delivered by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, Simon Stiell, at an event to mark the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement at the UN June Climate Meetings, Sixty-second session of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), in Bonn, Germany, on Saturday, June 21, 2025
Ten years ago, the Paris Agreement showed the world that multilateralism can deliver.
The prognosis was – and remains – clear: without cooperation between nations, humanity was on a crash course for self-destruction.
We know from the science that without the Paris Agreement we’d be headed for up to 5 degrees of heating.
No nation, no economy could survive that.
We’re now headed for around 3 – it shows how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.
The work Parties and many others have done through this process of UN-convened cooperation has literally changed the course of history.
The world we live in today is different because of Paris.
Today’s event gives us an opportunity to explore how it is a different place because of it.
And crucially what that means about the decisions we make in this process today, to create the world we want and we need.
Since Paris, clean energy investment has increased tenfold.
If you had said 10 years ago that clean energy investments would hit $2 trillion in 2024, you would have been met with heavy scepticism.
And that the Paris Agreement’s fingerprints would be visible across the multilateral system – from shipping to development finance, to national constitutions and courtrooms.
Paris was not the beginning, but it opened the door to much of the world order we accept as normal today.
Since Paris, over 80% of global GDP is now covered by net zero targets.
But we also know that change is not happening fast enough.
We know this through the outstanding global scientific cooperation with the IPCC.
That cooperation is one of this era’s most unsung but most powerful human advances.
Unfortunately, what that science shows us is that this can’t be described as human achievement.
The IPCC showed us that almost half of humanity is living in climate crisis hotspots – where people are 15 times more likely to die.
Friends, I raise this because it’s a stark reminder that there are two sides to the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement.
It’s a moment to reflect on all that has been achieved – and frankly I think we all need to a better job at explaining that to the world.
On that topic – I commend the Government of France for its initiative, with Brazil, to create a commemorative logo which can be used to promote climate-related events this year.
But this 10-year moment must also be an inflection point.
A moment where we step it up on multiple fronts.
This must be the decade of delivery. Of acceleration. Of implementation on the ground.
And I’m not talking about grand gestures or virtue signaling – I’m talking about blueprints for real-world economic opportunity; for security; for resilience; for growth. Backed up by real delivery.
And we know what will make the difference:
Finance – the great enabler of climate action in real economies – especially for those who need it most.
People often ask: what will the next decade of climate action look like and how must our process evolve?
The short answer is: over the next decade we must move our intergovernmental process much closer to the real economy and to climate action and the 8 billion people around the world, to accelerate and to implement.
We must go further, faster, fairer.
We will see from the secretariat’s three reports later this year how far we have come – on NDCs and the imperative of 1.5 – which remains both essential and achievable.
On adaptation and resilience.
And through the BTRs an important snapshot of the state of implementation.
COP30 then becomes the moment for the nations of the world to respond. And how we respond is up to us.
