What does US withdrawal mean for the global climate fight?

The Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC. The Energy Advice Hub team assesses the damage.

There has been no delay from President Trump when it comes to ditching climate commitments. On the very first day of his current term in office, he signed an executive order for the US to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This was followed by another executive order withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This comes alongside a flurry of withdrawals from dozens of international organisations and treaties, about everything from public health to counter-terrorism. But the question we’ve been asking in the UK and elsewhere is how this will affect international efforts to cut carbon emissions. Amnesty International commented that the move “sets a disturbing precedent” that “threatens to reverse more than a decade of global climate progress under the agreement”.

The Paris Agreement was a hard-won achievement and it’s fragile: can you imagine how hard it is to get almost every country on earth to agree on something and then stick to it? Of course there is concern that when the world’s biggest economy bails on the shared plan, others will be tempted to follow.

Tragedy of the commons?

If one country abandons its targets, the rest of us have to make up for it. You might have heard of the “tragedy of the commons” theory: when an individual behaves selfishly, it depletes shared resources. Crucially, it also undermines the incentive to conserve those resources for the good of the group. There is a limited stock of emissions that the world can safely release before triggering runaway climate change, and the Paris Agreement represents a plan to share those fairly without going over the limit. Now the United States has said it’s going to ignore the plan and pollute as much as it wants to. It’s understandable to fear that this will prompt a wider abandonment of the plan.

But is that the right reaction to Trump’s move? A 2024 research paper, The consequences of non-participation in the Paris Agreement, frames it differently. “In terms of welfare, the overwhelming majority of countries gain from the implementation of the Paris Agreement and most countries have only very little to gain from unilaterally deciding not to participate.”

Cost-benefit calculations

The reality, as set out in the study, is that the overwhelming majority of countries in the world gain from the implementation of global climate targets. That’s because the cost of our vulnerability to climate change outweighs any benefit from the high-emitting status quo. There are a few exceptions (such as Russia, with its cold climate and economic dependence on fossil fuels).

Crucially, the cost-benefit calculations for the Paris Agreement depend more on human decisions than on geography, so they’re not fixed. A couple of examples:

• A country rich in oil or gas might see no reason to cut fossil fuel use, but the incentives change drastically if the rest of the world focuses on the clean energy transition and we see plummeting demand for petrochemicals.
• A cool country with robust infrastructure might not worry about heatwaves or floods, but still experiences climate-related harm if the cost of imported goods from more vulnerable countries shoots up.

Tariffs, taxes and trade agreements are all ways for countries that are still co-operating on climate change to encourage the behaviour they want to see. A country that openly chooses not to co-operate might find itself on the wrong end of these economic levers.

Own goal

By withdrawing from international climate initiatives, the United States has already isolated itself. Apart from the US, there are only three countries that don’t fully participate in the Paris Agreement: Iran, Libya and Yemen. In the case of Yemen, this is because it’s in the middle of a civil war. The other two are taking steps towards ratifying the agreement. All three countries make up less than 2% of global emissions between them. No wonder perhaps that as I write this in March 2026, no other country has announced any intention to follow suit.

No wonder the UN’s climate chief described the move as “a colossal own goal” for the US. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is taking a different path. According to Reuters, the European Union’s solar and wind electricity generation outpaced fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. Meanwhile, China is becoming a global renewables superpower.

Globally, we’re still falling short on the emissions cuts we so desperately need. But almost every country on earth is still in agreement – at least officially – that those cuts are needed. Future climate negotiations might even go more smoothly now the Trump administration has given up a seat at the table. So our take on the Paris Agreement withdrawal is that it isn’t the disaster some have feared.

The US and the Paris Agreement: a turbulent timeline

This is actually the second time the United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. Trump signed off on the exact same thing during his first term in office, but withdrawal took so long that the US was only outside the agreement for a few months before rejoining under President Biden.