The US president-elect Donald Trump could opt for legal short-cuts to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement within a year rather than the stipulated four-year period.
The Paris Agreement, a global pact for fighting climate change, was signed in 2015 among almost 200 nations.
The accord, which seeks to phase out greenhouse gas emissions this century with a shift from fossil fuels, says in its Article 28 that any country wanting to pull out after joining up has to wait four years.
Trump, during his election campaigns, pledged to pull out of the Agreement that aims to limit global warming to within 2C, suggesting that the US should not waste “financial resources” on tacking the issue.
In theory, the earliest date for withdrawal is Nov. 4, 2020, around the time of the next U.S. presidential election.
But Trump could pull out of the parent treaty of the Paris Agreement, the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change with just a year’s notice, also voiding U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, U.N. legal experts say.
Many analysts however warn that such an action would strain the US relations with many foreign nations.
