On 12 December 2015, 196 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed the Paris Agreement in the French capital, committing to limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The Agreement's targets made large-scale expansion of renewable energy — including wind power — an economic and political necessity for signatory nations, triggering the most rapid expansion of global wind capacity in history. The Paris Agreement is the most significant international climate treaty ever adopted and has fundamentally reoriented global energy investment toward wind and solar.

The Paris Agreement became a touchstone for climate poetry and environmental writing in the years following its signing, galvanising a generation of poets to address carbon, atmosphere, and wind as political and existential subjects. Poets including Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, and Robin Wall Kimmerer used the Agreement's language of collective obligation and future generations to frame lyric engagements with wind, atmosphere, and elemental change. The Agreement's symbolic location in Paris — city of Baudelaire's spleen and ideal, of Verlaine's wind-poems, of the Symbolist tradition that shaped modern verse — gave it an accidental but resonant literary address.