London: US President Donald Trump has announced he is pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris climate change deal.

The choice, his biggest international policy decision to date, is an ill thought through move that will retard international efforts to tackle global warming and has already provoked an international furore of condemnation. Yet it by no means sounds a death knell for the deal.

Trump's announcement has split his administration with, for instance, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson favouring continued US support for Paris. Moreover, there is also significant support within the nation's business community for this stance too. Many US multinationals - including in the energy sector - argue that it is better for the United States to keep a seat at the table and influence an accord that big US businesses are ultimately likely to have to abide by in coming years.

However, the US President's decision is not wholly surprising given that he previously asserted that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive", and that he also received a letter last week from more than 20 Republican senators urging him to quit the 2015 agreement. Trump last week refused to indicate his support at G7 for the Paris deal.

Yet, Paris is a flexible, resilient agreement that could potentially withstand Trump's short-sightedness. The reason for this is not just that the Paris deal retains significant support across the world, including much of the Americas, China and the 28 member European Union. The landmark agreement intentionally has a flexible, "bottom-up" approach - compared with the previous Kyoto Protocol - and this greater decentralisation and suppleness means that US withdrawal will not necessarily be fatal.

While the wisdom of this flexible architecture appears obvious, it represents a breakthrough from the more rigid "top-down" Kyoto climate framework. While Kyoto worked in 1997 for the 37 developed countries and the EU states that agreed to it, a different way of working was needed for the much more complex Paris deal in 2015, which involves more than 170 diverse developing and developed states who agreed to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

The agreement's  flexible design means countries develop bespoke plans to realise emissions targets with national and sub-national governments working in partnership with business. In other words, while Paris created a global architecture for tackling global warming, it recognises that diverse, often decentralised policies are required by different types of economies to meet climate commitments.

That this approach makes sense is reflected in the diversity of climate measures that countries, pre-Paris, had started to make in response to global warming. This was illustrated in a major report by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics which focused on 98 countries plus the EU, together accounting for 93 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and revealed there are more than 800 climate-change laws and policies in place across the world, rising from 54 in 1997.

Approximately half of these (398) were legislative measures, and half (408) executive actions (decrees, for example). And 46 new laws and policies were passed in the 12 months prior alone - highlighting that domestic measures to address global warming are being approved at an increasing rate.Some 45 countries, including the 28 EU members as a bloc, have economy-wide targets to reduce their emissions. Together, they account for more than 75 per cent of global emissions.In addition, 41 states have economy-wide targets up to 2020, and 22 have targets beyond 2020.

Moreover, 86 countries have specific targets for renewable energy, energy demand, transportation or land-use, land-use change and forestry, while some 80 per cent of countries have renewable targets; the majority of them are executive policies.

Collectively, what this underlines is that the best way to tackle climate change is a decentralised approach with nations meeting their target commitments in innovative and effective ways that builds on this momentum. Even now Trump is pulling the United States out of the deal, Paris could still provide a resilient, flexible framework for climate action that potentially becomes a key foundation stone of future sustainable development for billions across the world.

Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.