The nations gathered made a historic step down a very long road

HISTORY is here,” declared François Hollande, France’s president, on Saturday morning. The UN climate conference in Paris had run over its original deadline, and the final text had yet to be seen, but the mood among the negotiators and ministers he was addressing was buoyant. And for the rest of a long day bonhomie kept on breaking out. China’s special representative for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, gave Nicholas Stern, a British economist, a jolly embrace. When Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, gaveled the agreement through in the evening there were cheers, tears and shouts of jubilation (pictured).

The “Paris agreement”, negotiated under the aegis of the UN, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”—a more ambitious goal than had been expected. Similar ambition was apparent in the agreement’s explicit goal of having as much greenhouse gas coming out of the atmosphere as going into it in the second half of the century.

In many procedural ways, too, the agreement surpassed what had been anticipated, delivering a range of compromises that all parties could live with and a lot of observers welcomed. Before the negotiations E3G, an activist think-tank, outlined three classes of possible outcome: a lowest common-denominator “Le zombie”; a so-so “comme-çi, comme-ça”; and an all out “Va va voom”. After seeing the agreement, it put it in the last category.

None of this vooming changed the fact that current efforts being made to fight climate change fall a very long way short of Paris’s ambitious goals. The world is nearly 1°C warmer than it was in the 18th century. The efforts outlined in the pledges on climate action—“intended nationally determined contributions” that 186 of the countries at the Paris negotiations have provided—are more in line with a total warming of 3°C than one of less than 2°C, the limit that was written into previous UN documents, let alone 1.5°C.

According to John Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, delivering a warming of “well below” 2°C requires that global carbon-dioxide emissions peak “well before 2030” and “should be eliminated as soon as possible after 2050”. That would represent a rate of “decarbonisation” (a word not to be found in the agreement, thanks to the sensitivities of Saudi Arabia and some other countries) far greater than the world has yet seen.

There are processes in the agreement designed to ratchet up the level of global action, but although they are more demanding than some had expected, they are not in themselves enough to make good the current gap. The agreement requires countries to act on climate change, and to increase their actions over time, but it says nothing concrete about how much anyone has to do. The hope is that with the whole world now on a settled course, with ever better technology and with a much greater flow of financing to developing countries, the ambition of these contributions, which will be revisited after “stocktakes” every five years, will quickly grow. The first such reckoning will be in 2018.

Genuine concern about the climate, public opinion and international pressure produced the pledges that were made for Paris. The hope is that similar bottom-up processes, rather than unenforceable UN mandates, will drive up the level of action in decades to come. The process should be helped by a more predictable stream of money from richer countries to poorer ones—as should efforts to adapt to the climate change that is not avoided. The Paris agreement requires a flow of $100 billion a year from developed countries to developing countries by 2020, with the sum to be revisited in 2025. It also requires them to make their plans for this money clear every couple of years.

Throughout the Paris conference, developed countries said they accepted their obligation to lead such efforts. One of the products of the two weeks of negotiations was that the agreement now “encourages” other nations to pitch in, too, should they be well-enough off to do so. This may not sound a big deal. But a sharp distinction between developed and developing countries has long been a sticking point in climate negotiations, with large developing countries like China (the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide) and India keen not to be treated in the same way as developed countries. The wording that encourages them to play a role in finance is one of a number of ways the Paris agreement found to move beyond that distinction. The fact that all nations are to make contributions on an increasingly equal basis was what justified Mr Hollande’s praise of the agreement as the first of its kind to be universal.

Mr Hollande was proud of the achievement, and he had reason. France, which had the presidency of the UN negotiations, managed the talks with a sure hand. The ground had been well prepared by its diplomats, led by Laurence Tubiana, the climate ambassador; the talks were kept open enough that all parties felt their voices were heard, but Mr Fabius moved things along firmly when necessary. It was a far cry from the botched mess of the Copenhagen climate summit six years ago.

The Paris agreement marks an unprecedented political recognition of the risks of climate change. Indeed, that is the lens through which to view its rather impractical-looking interest in the 1.5°C limit. It served to underline the urgency that more vulnerable nations feel about the issue, and to raise the stakes, even if, in practice, it will do little to increase the level of action in the near term. Delegates from low-lying islands threatened with flooding from rising sea levels could not travel home having signed a suicide pact. As the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, noted: “Our chance for survival is not lost.”

And yoked to the political progress is an economic transition. Perhaps the most significant effect of the Paris agreement in the next few years will be the signal it sends to investors: the united governments of the world say that the age of fossil fuels has started drawing to a close. That does not mean that they are necessarily right, nor that the closing will not be much more drawn out than the Marshall Islands and other such states would wish. But after Paris, the belief that governments are going to stay the course on their stated green strategies will feel a bit better founded—and the idea of investing in a coal mine will seem more risky.

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