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A decade after Paris pact, former US envoy and 2015 climate accord architect has sobering advice for SA

A decade after Paris pact, former US envoy and 2015 climate accord architect has sobering advice for SA
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Tiara Walters
By Tiara Walters
6 Mar 2025
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In the French capital, the former US climate envoy reflects on a fractured legacy and what’s next. South Africa, as a leader in Africa, should stay the course — regardless of grim times.

Paris — Ten years after the Paris Agreement, former US envoy Todd Stern, credited as the architect of the breakthrough that seeded the 2015 accord, returned to the city where that history was made. 

Speaking at a roundtable at Sciences Po research university on Tuesday to mark the occasion and discuss his new book, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, Stern offered an unvarnished analysis of the accord’s origins. 

The accord’s chief US negotiator also delved into the current crisis threatening global cooperation and aid.

Fractured past, uncertain future


Stern, reflecting on two-plus decades of negotiations, recalled the “bizarre world of climate COPs”, where progress was painstaking, punctuated by some breakthrough moments. 

Kyoto had solidified a flawed paradigm — developed and developing nations were separated by a “firewall”. Pressure was on the former to act. The latter was largely exempt. It was, he suggested, an arrangement designed to fail.

By the time Stern entered the Obama administration in 2009, he said he was determined not to repeat the cataclysm that followed the 1997 deal in Japan.  

The US had signed the Kyoto Protocol only to see it dead on arrival in the divided Senate. “It’s of no use to anybody — not us, not other countries.”

The collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was an inflection point.

“It was unbelievable — the most dramatic, tumultuous and mind-bending COP of seven years. It was regarded by most people — definitely then and I think even today — as a complete failure.”

Todd Stern in the French capital on Tuesday, 4 March 2025. (Photo: Tiara Walters)



Though chaotic, it had “chipped away” at the developed-developing country fault line, planting some of the seeds for Paris. 

“It started to introduce the notion that you can actually do some important things even if it’s not legally binding,” he argued.

‘Completely electrifying for the whole climate world’


By 2015, after two decades of climate clangers, Stern said he and his colleagues now knew the stakes. 

“There was a real sense of need to have this work — for climate change and for multilateralism,” said Stern.

The 2014 US-China climate deal was a defining moment for him. Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping stood shoulder by shoulder in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to announce their countries’ emissions targets. 

“John Kerry and I went [with Barack Obama] to China and met with Xi Jinping and everybody else to float this idea,” he recalled. “It had to be kept secret because we didn’t know for sure whether we would be able to go ahead until we saw what the Chinese target was. 

“If the target had been weak, we couldn’t send President Obama up there to put his arm around Xi Jinping.” 

The outcome, he now felt, “was completely electrifying for the whole climate world … The two 800-pound gorillas who were always fighting, they just said, ‘We’re going to do this together.’”

The non-binding nature of those targets, Stern argued, avoided the pitfall that required full Senate approval.

He also credited France’s handling of the Paris negotiations as a diplomatic feat, led by then Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. 

“The French really know how to do diplomacy,” Stern remarked. 

From pre-summit ministerial meetings to behind-the-scenes talks, France walked a tightrope while trying to ensure that countries felt heard, he observed.

The widely panned non-binding nature of the agreement, Stern admitted, was “not perfect”, but it was — he contended — a historic push in a better direction.

Stern’s victory under threat


Flexibility may have been the agreement’s cornerstone — allowing nations to ramp up their ambitions over time. 

But this aspect also makes it vulnerable to shifting winds, and the fate of climate policy that swings wildly with each US administration.

The Biden administration rejoined the agreement in 2021 after Trump had pulled out of it. 

Since, global cooperation is under historic fire — by US-China rivalry; Russia’s unprovoked, illegal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine; and, in 2025, US President Donald Trump’s executive order to exit from Paris once more.

Despite US ‘horror show’, South Africa must double down


Can Africa’s largest emitter — under pressure after the US withdrawal of $1-billion in energy transition finance and potentially other funding — be held to pre-Trump climate expectations? 

Responding to a question from Daily Maverick about USAID funding support, Stern said: “South Africa should do what it can on climate change and should not stop doing that because of other problems.”

He conceded that what “President Trump is doing, by appearing to try to destroy USAID, which is the main foreign assistance agency in the US government, among many other things, is just abominable”.

“There are no words for it. And people are, in South Africa and elsewhere, children and others, are dying around the world because the aid has been not just cut off, but abruptly cut off.

“And people who worked in the agency have been fired. It’s a kind of horror show. There’s nothing that I would express about those things other than contempt.”

Stern stressed: “I don’t think that South Africa should step away on climate because these other bad things are happening…

“I would call out the outrage, but not translate that into climate change unless there’s a very good reason. South Africa, as a leader in Africa, you don’t want to go there if you can avoid it.”

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze nearly $2-billion in foreign aid, but it was unclear when the funds would be released, the Associated Press reports.

What’s next?


Stern’s book reflects not only on “how it happened” and “why it matters”, but “what comes next”. Looking ahead to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Stern expressed equal parts hope and concern. 

“I’m extremely glad that Brazil is hosting,” he said. Yet, he acknowledged the challenges of sustaining momentum. 

“Technological progress towards the green transition has been absolutely spectacular,” he said, but it is not enough to overcome the “biggest obstacle”. 

That obstacle “is generated by the fossil fuel industry and the political economy that comes from that”.

Contesting that “is really about hearts and minds — whether that’s talking about presidents and prime ministers or it’s talking about citizens”. 

Many within grassroots civil society would argue that certain 800-pound gorillas lack Stern’s conditions for dissolving those obstacles.

At the South Africa-hosted UN climate summit in Durban, 2011, US Youth advocate Abigail Borah unleashed a blistering tongue-lashing at Stern. Stern’s performance there was the recipient of other criticism. 

“Citizens across the world are being held hostage by stillborn negotiations,” Borah shouted at a stony-faced Stern before being escorted from the plenary hall. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg88rf-5t4A

But Paris wasn’t just a government deal, Stern persisted in Paris on Tuesday — it opened the door for local leaders, companies and activists to play a bigger role. 

For Stern, then, the question is not if Paris was a breakthrough, but if the world can build on it, especially in these straitened times.

A monumental decade on, that question refuses to die. DM

Todd Stern’s lecture and roundtable was hosted by the IDDRI, a Sciences Po climate think-tank. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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