U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that the U.S. will withdraw from a wide range of major international climate, clean energy, sustainable development, and other global cooperation organizations, including the landmark UN climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
The announcement follows an Executive Order released by President Trump in February 2025, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review all international intergovernmental organizations in which the U.S. participates through funding and support, as well as all conventions and treaties. In a statement announcing the administration’s plans on Wednesday, Rubio said that the U.S. will withdraw from 66 organizations, describing them as “a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” and calling out “DEI,” “gender equity” and “climate orthodoxy” in particular as driving international organizations to “serve a globalist project rooted in the discredited fantasy of the ‘End of History.’”
The Trump administration’s move would make the U.S. the first country ever to pull out of the UNFCCC, a treaty with near-universal international participation, ratified in 1992. The UNFCCC is the parent treaty to landmark climate related agreements including the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which committed industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with agreed targets, and the Paris Agreement in 2015, a legally binding treaty requiring countries to set climate goals in line with the global goal to limit the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and calling on developed nations to provide financial assistance to less developed countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement during his first term in office, and again at the beginning of his second term, after President Biden returned the U.S. to the treaty in 2021. More recently, in a September speech at the U.N., Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
In addition to the UNFCCC, the presidential order directs U.S. federal agencies and departments to with draw from organizations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the key UN body focused on providing global policymakers with scientific assessments on climate change, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which supports international cooperation to advance the adoption of renewable energy, and other climate and sustainable development groups including the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, the Global Forum on Migration and Development, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the International Energy Forum, the International Solar Alliance, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, UN Oceans, and the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, among others.
Environmental groups sharply criticized the Trump administration’s announcement, warning that the move would isolate the U.S., to the detriment of its own economic interests. Environmental Defense Fund Executive Director Amanda Leland said:
“The Trump administration’s retreat from the effort to reduce pollution and climate disasters will hurt the American people and businesses. It will turn over leadership to other countries, and the United States will get no say in these critical decisions.”
Representatives from other governments also criticized the move. Wopke Hoekstra, European Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth, said:
“The UNFCCC underpins global climate action. It brings countries together to support climate action, reduce emissions, adapt to climate change, and track progress. The decision by the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter to retreat from it is regrettable and unfortunate.”
Click here for the full list of organizations targeted for withdrawal by the U.S.
