Trump can leave the Paris Agreement behind, but not America's climate finance obligations

When countries at the last climate summit COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, agreed on a new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG), it was the Biden Administration that signed on for the United States to an outcome that many derided as unambitious and inadequate in light of the climate emergency. What a difference a year makes. In January the United States announced that it would leave the Paris Agreement for a second time and stop all international climate finance payments. When countries come together at COP30 in Belém, Brazil to recognize the 10 year anniversary of the Paris Agreement and to debate both ambition in climate action and the merits of the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap on how to fulfill the NCQG promise of delivering US$ 1.3 trillion annually to developing countries by 2035, the United States under Trump will not even send a delegation. Skirting the climate talks and leaving the Paris Agreement, however, does not erase the continued legal obligation of the United States to support developing countries financially - and at a scale that is commensurate with the country’s global responsibility as the historically largest emitter as a matter of climate justice.

Leaving the Paris Agreement – again

On 20 January 2025, the very first day of his second term as president, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, calling it an “unfair, one-sided…rip off”. The exit will be formalized exactly one year later in January 2026, much quicker than during the first Trump administration in 2017 when restrictions on exiting the treaty during its first few years led to the withdrawal only becoming effective toward the end of Trump’s first term. Thus, the Trump Administration could have chosen to stay in the talks during 2025. However, already at the Bonn intersessional climate talks in June, no official US representative attended. This followed the dissolution of the office in the US State Department responsible for climate negotiations and climate finance support just weeks earlier. 

The US absence during the Bonn talks was treated with almost relief by many delegates, as the continued participation of US negotiators under Trump likely would have been overly confrontational and destructive, rather than constructive. It gave large Global South countries like China and India a political boost in the climate talks, while European countries, left without the cover US negotiators historically provided them with, failed to show the climate leadership necessary. Though the US withdrawal was expected, as it was both a campaign promise to Trump’s base and a repeat of the action undertaken during the first Trump administration, it still registered as a blow to international climate action at a tenuous time for the climate regime facing both financing shortfalls and questions of its efficacy and its legitimacy in light of the shortcomings of the climate process to successfully curb emissions. This, of course, has been further aggravated by the US withdrawal given the unique responsibility the US has as the historically largest emitter to show leadership in emissions reduction and provide climate financing.

Exactly 10 years after the Paris Agreement (PA) was adopted as a legally binding international treaty on climate change by 196 Parties to the UNFCCC, including the US, at COP21, its main goals “to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” and to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” seem more elusive than ever. As part of the terms of the PA, countries committed to five-year cycles of increasingly ambitious climate action, tracked by national climate action plans or nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Article 9 of the PA also reaffirmed that developed countries must “provide financial resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the Convention.”

Failing to Contribute to the NCQG 

Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement comes on the heels of the agreement on the NCQG at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last fall. The NCQG is to replace a commitment by developed countries from 2009 to raise $100 billion per year by 2020. At the COP21 in Paris, Parties agreed that a new collective quantified goal was needed and that it shall be set from the floor of the $100 billion goal by 2025. Deliberations on the NCQG’s scale and scope, and efforts to come up with a significantly higher figure took three years, with developing countries urging to focus on a science- and needs-based scale of the new goal and apply lessons learned from the shortcomings of the US$100 billion goal, which by some accounts was only reached in 2022, despite developed countries’ historical responsibility and economic capability to pay. Developed countries on their part insisted that mobilized private sector contributions and financing from larger emerging market economies should count towards the NCQG, thus reducing their own role and obligations. With financing needs of developing countries amounting to trillions – the High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance calculated at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2030 – Parties agreed to an NCQG of $300 billion annually by 2035, widely seen as an act of climate injustice. Its inadequacy is illustrated by numbers provided in the second Needs Determination Report by the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance in 2024 estimating that the costed needs from nationally determined contributions (NDCs), with much higher figures expected after an NDC update this year, amounted to $5.012- 6.852 trillion cumulatively until 2030, corresponding to an annualized figure of $455-585 billion through 2030.

The NCQG decision also includes a commitment to triple outflows from the UNFCCC climate funds by 2030 from 2022 levels. This tripling would require a drastic increase in the public financing contributed by developed countries, especially the US, to the multilateral climate funds. Upcoming relevant processes calling out developed countries’ continued commitment include the 9th replenishment cycle for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to begin in July 2026; the upcoming third replenishment cycle for the GCF, which kicks off in late 2027; and capitalizing the FRLD via its first replenishment scheduled for early 2028. However, it is clear that no American contribution can be expected for any of these funds serving the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement under the Trump Administration. Other developed countries, rather than increasing their own climate finance contributions to fill the US void, have likewise reduced their current and future projected climate finance delivery significantly. Overall overseas development aid (ODA), from which most climate finance is drawn, is expected to decline by between 9% and 17% in 2025, on top of a 9% drop in 2024, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). American ODA cuts alone are projected to be $23.4 billion in 2025. 

At the same time, as largest shareholder in the World Bank and in other MDBs, the US Treasury Department has increased pressure within MDB Boards by pushing Bank management to drop a focus on climate finance support and “getting back to basics.” This is understood as a development finance mandate judged for its effectiveness primarily by whether it serves American foreign policy interests. This matters as a significant share of the NCQG’s core $300 billion per year goal by 2035 is supposed to come from climate-related development finance channeled through the MDBs. At COP29 in Baku, MDBs had boasted that they would be able to jointly provide $120 billion annually in climate finance to low- and middle-income countries by 2030, including $42 billion for adaptation, and poised to mobilize another $65 billion from the private sector.

In addition, the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to be presented by the COP29 and COP30 Presidencies just before Belém foresees the larger $1.3 trillion mobilization goal by 2035 from investments from all sources; however, it is formulated in even more non-binding terms than the official goal as a vague ambition only, focusing more on domestic resource and private sector mobilization than on developed countries’ public finance provision.

Trump’s Hard Stop to US Climate Finance Support

As one of his first executive orders on the day of his inauguration, President Trump announced that his administration “shall immediately cease or revoke any purported financial commitment made by the United States under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

This was in stark contrast to, and an abdication of, the climate finance commitments made under the previous Biden Administration, which had announced at the start of its term just four years earlier a pledge to contribute $11.4 billion annually in international climate aid by 2024, but reached that goal only for one of the four years (fiscal year 2024-2025) in office. Though the United States made pledges to multilateral climate funds during Biden’s term, including for example a $3 billion pledge to the GCF at COP28, the confirmation of the pledges were subject to the availability of funds. One of the main hurdles to the disbursement of pledges was the appropriation limit set by Congress to only $1 billion annually for climate finance during the Biden presidency. The administration was ultimately able to reach the $11.4 billion figure through a mix of loans, investments and guarantees for projects with climate benefits through a variety of channels, mainly the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the U.S. Export Import Bank (EXIM), the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Under Biden, about 40% of all international climate finance from the US flowed through the DFC. In fiscal year 2024, this amounted to $3.7 billion. In the 2019 reauthorization of EXIM, Congress implemented a new requirement that the bank “dedicate no less than 5% of its annual financing to promote exports related to renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy storage”, which would be the equivalent of $6.75 billion per year, but there has been no confirmation that the bank has met this goal in the years since. Programs administered through the State Department and USAID during the Biden years were responsible for about one-third of the total US climate finance support and most of the country’s grant-based climate finance and adaptation financing.

Within weeks of President Trump taking office, the funding for the US government agencies and programs previously responsible for climate finance was frozen, and channels shut down. This involved cutting 86% of USAID programs, with the remaining programs being brought under control of the State Department, effectively shuttering the agency. While some of the few remaining programs may retain some indirect climate benefits, the cuts to USAID will leave a gap in climate financing globally that no other single country is likely to fill and the European Union as the largest cumulative provider of climate finance likely unwilling to respond to. In addition to direct programming support, resulting in the termination of thousands of contracts and a drastic reduction in funding for climate initiatives worldwide, globally civil society climate advocacy is also severely affected, as many non-governmental organizations have received US support for their work in pushing their own governments towards greater climate ambition. DFC and EXIM as the main American export credit agency were initially untouched and non-targeted by Trump. While a few billion dollars in loans were geared towards climate actions according to their FY2025 budget proposals, both face tough reauthorization efforts that are likely to refocus their financial interaction on US foreign policy priorities, including a push for critical minerals and fossil fuel exports, but no longer on energy transition.

Pledges to multilateral climate funds rescinded

President Trump has also rescinded pledges by former administrations to multilateral climate funds, most prominently outstanding $4 billion in pledges from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), but also $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund under the Climate Investment Funds administered by MDBs. He also barred the participation of U.S. officials and researchers from multilateral climate funds’ meetings and other international climate processes, such as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In March, the administration formally withdrew its participation from the Board of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), with the US contribution of only $17.5 million made by the Biden Administration in 2024 fully paid in. In contrast, the promised $50 million American contribution for the chronically underfunded Adaptation Fund never materialized. The level of future U.S. participation in the Adaptation Fund, Global Environment Facility and Climate Investment Funds remains unclear. The US also withdrew its financial participation with billions in pledged support from several Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) agreements with South Africa, Indonesia, and Vietnam, a move announced in March 2025. This withdrawal cancels US financial pledges and cancels grant projects previously funded, including over $1 billion in commitments to South Africa and over $3 billion to Indonesia and Vietnam. Just a few years ago, JETPs were touted as the new form of climate finance collaboration. While the remaining International Partners Group (IPG) members remain committed to continuing the initiative, seeking alternative concessional funding will be challenging.

US Continued Obligation to Provide Climate Finance

In 2024, average global temperatures were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Despite the rhetoric of the Trump administration, decades of scientific research has proven an indisputable link between the “total amount of CO2 released by human activity and the level of warming at the Earth’s surface”. Because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, scientists can link present and future changes in the climate to the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Today this translates to vulnerable communities, located mostly in the Global South, who have contributed the least to global warming, already experiencing the worst impacts caused by the cumulative CO2 emissions of developed countries, mainly the US. This is a crying climate injustice.

Depending on the boundaries of a particular study’s time series, researchers estimate that the US alone is historically responsible for between 400 and 500 billion tonnes of CO2

Emissions, or 20 to 25% of the global total. The US has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date and arguably for this reason, it and other historical emitters such as the UK and EU countries should be responsible for contributing the largest share of financing towards climate change mitigation, adaptation, and for addressing loss and damage. Most of the significant climate-related costs, estimated to reach nearly 700 billion per year by 2030, will fall on developing countries that lack the resources to cover these costs, due to limited fiscal space, high indebtedness, the high costs of capital, and continuing obstacles to accessing available climate finance. Several efforts have been made to calculate how much the US would have to contribute as its fair share to global climate finance to fulfill its continued obligations. One 2024 study by US civil society organizations found that as “an extremely wealthy, high-capacity country that has produced a quarter of humanity’s total historical emissions,” the US would have to contribute $446 billion per year in grant or grant equivalent climate finance to cover mitigation, adaptation and for addressing loss and damage.

Through a climate justice lens, it is clear that industrialized countries continue to owe the Global South a growing “climate debt”, with previous and current climate finance commitments, such as the 2009 COP15 commitment of industrialized or Annex II countries to provide climate finance “rising to $100 billion per year by 2020 to support climate action in poorer nations”, now superseded by the higher NCQG, inadequate in quantity and quality to respond to the needs. Both the UNFCCC, which obligates Annex II countries (OECD countries excluding economies in transition) and the Paris Agreement, which mandates developed countries, are clear that these countries must provide financial resources to assist developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation. Because the Paris Agreement only continues but does not change the financial obligation stated under the original climate convention, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement does mean that the US in completely abandoning international climate finance delivery is reneging on its legal obligations. 

Pressure to Leave UNFCCC Entirely

While Trump campaigned on leaving the Paris Agreement specifically, his allies have also mounted pressure to withdraw from the UNFCCC entirely, arguing that there is “zero benefit to remaining” and Trump’s withdrawal would prevent future administrations from “circumventing Senate advice and consent on treaties”. The US has been party to the convention since the Senate’s near unanimous endorsement of the Framework in 1992. Under the US Constitution, a President has the power to make treaties with the approval of at least two-thirds of the Senate. However, the Constitution does not explicitly provide guidance for leaving treaties, which is why experts are divided on the legality of a possible unilateral decision by Trump to leave the UNFCCC.

In February of this year, President Trump directed his Cabinet to present to him by August a draft list of recommendations on whether to leave any international organizations or agreements that didn’t align with US interests. This order resulted in the closure of the Office of Global Change within the State Department, which was responsible for the management of US international climate change policy and considered “the bridge” between the US and the UNFCCC. The August deadline passed without any announcement of Trump’s UNFCCC intentions, and he also did not mention leaving the UNFCCC during his remarks to the 2025 UN General Assembly in September. Though the US remains party to the Convention in name, it has already violated its key obligations by, for the first time in history, missing its emissions inventory submission deadline in April and rescinding its climate finance support to developing countries.

A Widening Ambition Gap for NDCs 

Ahead of COP30, all Parties to the UNFCCC were expected to submit their third updated NDCs, which every five years outline each country’s climate actions toward reducing emissions, with the Global Stocktake meant to assess their progress and reflect any necessary increase in action. The original deadline for this year was February 2025, but it was extended until September after only 13 of the 195 Parties submitted their plans on time. The tardiness of submissions, or lack of submission entirely, comes at a time when a “quantum leap in ambition” is necessary in order to meet the Paris 1.5 degree Celsius target. Just days ahead of COP30, the UNFCCC released its NDC Synthesis Report for 2025 for 64 new NDCs submitted by 64 Parties between January 2024 and end of September 2025, but covering only 30 percent of global emissions in 2019. Instead, countries representing 64 percent of global emissions still, including the European Union block, have not formally submitted new NDCs and are not included in this analysis. The report underscored the need to accelerate implementation and “pick up the pace” to close the ambition gap, with climate finance as the core means of implementation remaining the key to unlock ambition, as many of the updated NDCs submitted by developing countries outline their most ambitious intended climate efforts as conditional on receiving climate finance support.

The US is actually one of the few countries to have submitted its NDC on time, although under the Trump Administration, it will not be worth the paper it was written on. Published in 2024 before President Biden left office, the 2035 emissions reduction target was set to 61 to 66 percent below 2005 levels. This target was meant to be achieved through policies and actions supported by the US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation provided the funding and regulatory framework to build a “new clean energy economy”. Though the target was below what the science recommended for the country, it was a step forward.

Undermining Climate Action Both Domestically and Internationally 

Not only is the Trump Administration not actively participating in the climate regime at this point and not honoring its predecessors’ climate commitments, it is also doing all it can by working outside of the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement to actively undermine global collective climate goals both at home and internationally. According to the White House, Trump’s broader goal is to “restore America’s energy dominance and [ensure] energy independence”, which he refuses to jeopardize by pursuing “vague climate goals”. With the US already globally the biggest producer of crude oil and natural gas, under President Trump further drilling and exploration is scheduled to accelerate, including in formerly protected nature reserves. As a result, he has launched attacks on both domestic climate policy and the greater international climate regime. In addition to gutting former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and rendering the US’s latest NDC targets effectively unattainable through the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump has also made headlines this year for pressuring other countries to abandon their own climate ambitions through his trade and tariff policies.

Of the trade deals that have been finalized since Trump’s introduction of country-specific reciprocal tariffs, most include some kind of agreement to purchase US oil and gas. South Korea and the European Union both agreed to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to buying US fossil fuel products at the expense of their own climate plans and in contradicting the mandates under Article 2.1.c.of the Paris Agreement, which urge all Parties to align all their finance flows with climate goals. The Trump administration has also discouraged other countries from signing on to new international agreements that would support climate action and ambition. In April, the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) drafted its Net-Zero Framework that would impose fees on ships that violate global emissions standards. The US pulled out of the negotiations leading to this agreement, but months later issued a warning through its Secretaries of State, Energy and Commerce that the US will fight the adoption of the framework and urged fellow IMO members to join them in its rejection. The US also dropped its support for the UN Plastics Pollution Treaty ahead of the most recent talks in August.

Facing Moral and Legal Consequences

With these and other actions, the US under Donald Trump has turned from a self-perceived former leader in climate negotiations and stabilizing force for the international climate regime to a climate pariah undermining collective climate action. However, willful abdication of previously made commitments does not absolve the US of its legal obligations. Nor does it absolve the rest of the world, and in particular rich countries of the Global North, from doing everything in their power to move climate ambition forward. More than ever, at the 10^th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC needs a coalition of the willing to show that the multilateral climate regime is resilient. 

This point was reaffirmed with moral and judicial clarity in the July 2025 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest international court, which confirms that all states have legal obligations under international human rights law and international environmental treaties, including the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, to make all efforts and take all necessary measures to protect the climate and safeguard a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as the basis for the enjoyment of human rights and intergenerational equity. These obligations apply to all states, irrespective of whether they are parties to climate treaties. The court also clarified and confirmed the continuing obligation of developed countries to provide developing countries with climate finance support for mitigation and adaptation “in a manner and at a level that allows for the achievement” of the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to the 1.5C target. This is a powerful reminder that even though climate harm comes from multiple states and actors, each state can and must still be held individually responsible for its contribution – or in the case of climate finance – for its failure to contribute. While the UNFCCC and Paris agreement lack enforcement action for non-compliance, legal, scientific and moral pressure on the US will continue to mount. This includes ultimately climate litigation, with the ICJ Advisory Opinion opening the door to require reparations from states like the US that ignore their climate obligations.