U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tells The Washington Post that he believes the Paris Agreement on climate change could enter into force as early as next Wednesday at a special summit at the United Nations. This trajectory would bring the historic climate agreement into effect less than a year after it was negotiated at COP21 in December 2015, Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis report.

“There’s been a real push to make that happen,” Kerry said in an interview with The Washington Post this week in his office at the State Department ahead of this week’s Our Ocean conference, which includes a focus on climate change and acidification. “I know the president has been talking to people; we’ve been talking to people everywhere. I’m feeling more and more confident that we can get this thing done this year.”

As Mooney and Dennis report, “There has been a major focus on bringing the agreement, negotiated last December in Paris, into force rapidly because of the urgency of the climate-change problem. But Obama administration officials have an additional reason for pushing to make the deal a reality. The agreement’s language suggests that once it has achieved this legal status of entering into force, a future President Trump, who has said he would withdraw from the agreement, would not be able to do so for at least four years.”