Major global events that shook 2015

This year saw some major political, economic, military and cultural events take place around the world.

Read on as CNBC looks back at some of the most significant.

—By CNBC.com's Anmar Frangoul. Posted on December 31, 2015.

Syria's descent into conflict has resulted in the deaths of more than 220,000 people, according to the United Nations, with millions displaced from their homes as President Bashar Assad and his opponents have waged a bitter, bloody war.

As of December 17, there were 4.39 million registered Syrian refugees across Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, according to the UNHCR - the UN's refugee agency.

In a rare show of unity, the UN Security Council unanimously agreed on December 18 to a plan for peace in Syria, with the international organization to facilitate talks between the Syrian government and opponents in early January.

The council also expressed support for "free and fair elections… to be held within 18 months and administered under United Nations supervision."

In January 2015, terror came to Paris when two radicalized brothers attacked the offices of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Customers in a kosher deli were also targeted by a third terrorist.

In all, 17 people were killed over three days, while all three gunmen were eventually killed by armed police in raids.

In November, France suffered another atrocity when 130 people lost their lives in co-ordinated terror attacks by Islamist militants across Paris. The attack was the deadliest in Europe since 2004 when commuter trains in Madrid were bombed by al-Qaeda inspired terrorists, killing 191 people.

European cities remain on high alert for fear of similar attacks and police investigations continue.

Chinese stock markets plunged in June, with aftershocks in July and August. The crash followed a year-long run-up in stocks and came in the wake of consistently weak economic data from China and a surprise devaluation of the yuan in August.

On August 24, China's benchmark Shanghai Composite index slumped 8.5 percent, in its biggest one-day percentage loss since 2007.

Fears of stock market contagion and a "hard landing" for the world's second-largest economy saw stock global indexes like the Nasdaq and Dow pushed into correction territory.

FIFA, world soccer's governing body, has not had the best of years.

Allegations of widespread corruption have hammered the organization and at the end of May the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) stunned the world by announcing it had indicted nine FIFA officials and five corporate executives.

The defendants were charged with a range of offenses including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies. In December, the DoJ indicted 16 additional FIFA officials.

Plus, FIFA's Ethics Committee banned FIFA President Sepp Blatter (pictured) and Michel Platini, president of UEFA, from soccer for eight years. That was in relation to a payment of 2 million Swiss francs ($2 million) made by FIFA to Platini in 2011.

The auto industry was shaken to its core after German car-making giant, Volkswagen, was accused by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of cheating on diesel emissions tests.

In November the company announced that "irregularities" may have arisen in roughly 800,000 vehicles, but in December it cut this estimate to 36,000.

Once-warm relations between Turkey and Russia were sharply damaged after Turkish fighter jets downed a Russian Sukhoi SU-24 plane that Turkey said had entered its airspace.

Russian President Vladimir Putin denied the allegation and described the downing as a "stab in the back."

In the wake of the incident, Russia imposed sanctions on Turkey, including restricting or banning Turkish imports like vegetables and fruits. It has also banned charter flights between the two countries and suspended the visa-free travel agreement.

"If we allow our sovereign rights to be violated ... then the territory would no longer be our territory," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said of the incident.

After five decades of enmity, July saw communist Cuba and the United States finally restore diplomatic relations.

In August, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Havana to officially reopen the U.S. Embassy there.

"The time has come for us to move in a more promising direction," Kerry said. "In the United States, that means recognizing that U.S. policy is not the anvil on which Cuba's future will be forged," he added, before stating that, "Cuba's future is for Cubans to shape."

In January 2015, Syriza, the radical left-wing, anti-austerity party led by Alexis Tsipras, won the Greek national election.

This heralded months of tense and high-stake negotiations between the party and the Greece's bailout supervisors, during which time the country missed a loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund.

Tsipras backed down and agreed to onerous bailout conditions and in exchange, euro zone ministers agreed to lend as much as 86 billion euros ($94 billion) to Greece over the course of three years.

Despite a popular backlash in Greece after his capitulation, Tsipras went on to win a snap election in September. The Greek Prime Minister goes into 2016 facing the task of implementing tough economic reforms in a country that has suffered greatly as a result of austerity.

At the end of the year, world leaders reached a landmark agreement on climate change at a massive summit in Paris.

After a fortnight of tough, draining negotiations, nearly 200 countries agreed to a long-term goal of keeping global warming "well below" 2 degrees Celsius.

According to the European Commission, governments have now agreed that global emissions should "peak as soon as possible", and that every five years governments will meet up to set themselves "more ambitious targets as required by science."

Commenting on the agreement, U.S. President Barack Obama thanked, "the people of nearly 200 nations – large and small, developed and developing – for working together to confront a threat to the people of all nations."

What exactly will be achieved remains to be seen.

The economic, as well as environmental, cost, of not acting on climate change is potentially huge. Up to $44 trillion could be knocked off the global economy by 2060 if the world does nothing, according to research from U.S. banking giant Citigroup.

Spain remains without a ruling government after no party won an overall majority in December elections that saw increasing support for political newcomers.

Neither of the country's two main parties, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's ruling Partido Popular (PP) or the socialist Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE), gained a sufficient majority to rule alone.

"One thing is for sure: Rajoy is going to have a very hard time to form a government, because he just doesn't have the coalition partners … the potential partners to basically form that alliance," Antonio Barroso, political analyst at Teneo Intelligence, an advisory firm, told CNBC.

Arguably, the big winner in the country's most significant election since its transition to democracy was the left-wing, anti-austerity party, Podemos – Spanish for "we can" – led by charismatic former lecturer turned politician, Pablo Iglesias.

Formed only last year, Podemos won 69 seats, gaining 20.66 percent of the vote. The centrist Ciudadanos, formed in 2015, won 40 seats, while the ruling PP won 123 seats and the PSOE won 90.