Following Donald Trump’s exit from the Paris climate agreement,  Joe Biden has planned to take the steps to allow the US back into the agreement.

In his first day of office, the new US President has said he plans to make tackling climate change a priority by rejoining the Paris agreement and blocking the Keystone XL pipeline.

Biden will revoke the permit for the pipeline, which is a cross-border project that would bring 830,000 barrels of crude oil each day.

The US withdrew from the climate agreement in June 2017 and was the first country to formally do so. Trump described the agreement as “a total disaster for our country.”

Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate advisor to Bill Clinton’s White House, said: “Day one, Biden will rejoin Paris, regulate methane emissions and continue taking many other aggressive executive climate actions in the opening days and weeks of his presidency.”

The new President has also said that he will provide support to federal government scientists, who struggled under the Trump administration.

Helen Mountford, vice-president for climate at the World Resources Institute, describes what having Biden in leadership will mean for the US.

“It will be a starkly different approach to the Trump administration on almost every front,” she said. “Science will once again guide America’s policymaking and inauguration day will mark a new era for climate ambition in the US. He will have a lot on his plate but there’s no doubt that Biden intends to make a full court press on climate change.”

Biden has said that he plans to cut US emissions to net zero by 2050 and create millions of new jobs in renewable energy.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency, said that the President will need to “put his money where his mouth is.”

He said: “Folks will be more focused on the greenhouse gas side of the paradigm, which is maybe a quarter of the work. There needs to be a comprehensive federal strategy for environmental justice. We have to rebuild trust with communities that we took decades to build up and then was broken. The bogeyman, which is Trump, may be gone but we still need to focus on dismantling that structural environmental racism. Trump just threw more gasoline on what was already there.”