Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Climate Solutions Lab

Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next

Todd Stern

Thursday, October 10, 2024

12:00pm – 1:00pm

Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

Lunch served

From Barak Obama’s lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. 

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time. In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself.

Join Todd Stern in conversation with Professor Christopher Rea.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama’s chief climate negotiator.