The Paris Agreement, Five Years Later

This special edition of The World Today will kick off Penn Climate Week with a discussion of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, five years after its adoption. The most ambitious global climate accord in history, the Paris Agreement aimed to limit global temperature rise to below 2° Celsius and pursue efforts to limit the rise to 1.5°C.

Both negotiators and activists acknowledge the agreement is far from perfect, but it has still had an impact. How has the Paris Agreement contributed to emission reduction so far? Where does the global community go from here, and what can climate organizations do to encourage more aggressive climate action? Will the COVID-19 pandemic be a catalyst for the world to embrace extreme changes in response to climate change?

Join us for this virtual edition of The World Today, as Sue Biniaz—a Perry World House Visiting Fellow this year and the lead American negotiator of the Paris Agreement—discusses her experiences in Paris and how the global community must address the climate crisis in conversation with PWH Senior Faculty Fellow Michael Weisberg.

Speakers

Susan Biniaz

Visiting Fellow Perry World House

Susan Biniaz, a former Deputy Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department, was the lead climate lawyer and a climate negotiator for the U.S. government from 1989 to early 2017. She worked on a wide variety of other subjects during her time at the State Department, including legal issues related to U.S. treaty practice, outer space, law of the sea, the environment, Somali piracy, the Middle East, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, law enforcement, human rights, and private international law. Since leaving the government, she has taught international law courses at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Yale. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the UN Foundation, a Senior Advisor at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Climate Advisers.

Moderator

Michael Weisberg

University of Pennsylvania Professor and Chair of Philosophy, as well as Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of Post-Graduate Programs at Perry World House

He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Biology and Philosophy, advisor to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Nairobi Work Programme, and directs Penn’s campus-wide transdisciplinary research in Galápagos. He is the author of Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World and Galápagos: Life in Motion. Much of Professor Weisberg’s research is focused on how highly idealized models and simulations can be used to understand complex systems. He also leads efforts to better understanding the interface between humans and wildlife, between humans and the climate system, and how scientific issues are understood by communities in the Americas and in East Asia. Professor Weisberg received a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 1999, and continued graduate study in Philosophy and Evolutionary Biology at Stanford University, earning a 2003 Ph.D. in Philosophy.