NEW YORK— President Donald Trump announced today that he is withdrawing the United States from the world’s foundational climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. Trump also pulled out of dozens of other global environmental agreements and bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

“Trump cutting ties with the world’s oldest climate treaty is another despicable effort to let corporate fossil fuel interests run our government,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s foolish and downright deadly for Trump to turn his back on the climate devastation ripping across the U.S. and the world. Pulling out of this Senate-approved climate pact and dozens of other treaties is Trump’s latest illegal executive overreach.”

Passed in 1992, the UNFCCC established the first global framework agreement for nearly 200 countries to coordinate international efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions to prevent human-caused climate change. It was the launchpad for the Paris Agreement in 2015. The U.S. Senate approved President George H.W. Bush’s signing of the UNFCCC in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, allowing the U.S. to ratify the treaty.

“Pulling out of the UNFCCC is a different order of magnitude from the Paris Agreement,” said Su. “It removes the U.S. completely from the global climate framework and negotiations. Given deeply polarized U.S. politics, it’s going to be nearly impossible for the U.S. to rejoin the UNFCCC with a two-thirds majority vote. Letting this lawless move stand could shut the U.S. out of climate diplomacy forever.”

But even without a court order or congressional action undoing Trump’s action, the next president could reverse the withdrawal and re-enter the U.S. in the UNFCCC.

The U.S.’s withdrawal is effective one year from today’s notification. It removes the U.S. from global cooperative actions to address the climate emergency and cancels its obligations in every subsequent related treaty thereafter.

Today’s UNFCCC withdrawal comes one year after Trump’s notification of withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which committed parties to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and submit national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in service of this goal. Withdrawals from the Paris Agreement go into effect one year after notification.

Trump’s action today also withdraws the U.S. from scientific bodies that play critically important roles in protecting the world’s climate and biodiversity.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world’s preeminent scientific institution on climate change, formed to advise the members of the UNFCCC. For more than three decades, it has produced the most important assessments on the causes and dangers of climate change. Similarly, the International Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services produces critically important assessments of the threats to the world’s biodiversity.

“Withdrawing from the world’s leading climate, biodiversity and scientific institutions threatens all life on Earth,” said Su.