Selin in The Conversation on the U.S. Leaving the Paris Agreement
Henrik Selin, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed examining whether the Paris Agreement on climate change can succeed without the United States.
Selin’s Op-Ed, entitled “Can the Paris Agreement on Climate Change Succeed Without the US? 4 Questions Answered,” was published in The Conversation on November 12, 2019.
From the text of the Op-Ed:
1. What is the process for a country to leave the Paris Agreement?
President Trump announced in the summer of 2017 that he intended to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, as he had pledged during the 2016 campaign. The agreement was adopted in 2015 and entered into international legal force on Nov. 4, 2016.
Article 28 of the agreement stipulates that a member can begin a formal withdrawal process no earlier than three years after the treaty enters into force. The Trump administration took this step when it notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations on Nov. 4, 2019 that it intends to leave.
Trump’s notice of withdrawal will become effective one year later, on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020 – one day after the next presidential election.
Henrik Selin conducts research and teaches classes on global and regional politics and policy making on environment and sustainable development. He is a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich. His most recent book is EU and Environmental Governance, by Routledge Press, and is also the author of Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management by MIT Press.