Climate Summits Are Failing, but Change Is Still Possible
Almost thirty years following the inaugural UN climate conference, emissions continue to increase. The global system for addressing climate change is ineffective – it’s sluggish, unwieldy, and lacks democratic principles. Even Donald Trump may not be entirely incorrect when he attributes to the UN the tendency to produce “empty words and then never [following] those words up.” When evaluating the advancements since the inaugural UN Cop climate summit in 1995, the statistics on emissions reveal that, in fact, there has been little substantial change despite years of rhetoric. We urgently need to not only redesign climate policies but also to establish a new method for drafting those policies. Climate change could indeed serve as the appropriate issue to explore an approach that may inspire broader reform of multinational institutions. A conference I have helped organise, commencing on October 16 in Venice, will address three key ideas regarding the global governance of climate change.
Initially, it is essential to progressively revamp the decision-making process to address a shortfall in both efficiency and democratic principles. Decisions today are sluggish and feeble as they effectively aim for consensus. The Paris agreement, for instance, mandated that 55 countries responsible for at least 55% of global emissions must participate for it to take effect. Nevertheless, diplomats labored to ensure that all 195 UN member states could reach an agreement – even those that subsequently withdrew – by employing language that often comes across as “empty” to prevent offending anyone. Simultaneously, the process fails to encompass all the relevant parties: notably, the microstate of San Marino is among the signatories of the agreements, while the megacity of Los Angeles is not. Current mechanisms also overlook the chance to explore direct representation for groups significantly impacted by climate change, including young people, indigenous communities, and farmers. One idea would be to utilize the relative concentration of the world economy. China, the US, and India account for nearly half of the global population (including a significant portion living below the poverty line), over half of the world’s GDP and emissions, as well as the majority of private investment in artificial intelligence, which could lead to some of the most intriguing solutions.
Reforms that extend beyond the existing broad agreement are essential. For instance, some experts have suggested a qualified majority voting system, where changes could necessitate a supermajority of countries or potentially a majority of both developed and developing nations. However, we must strive for even greater ambition: voting rights ought to be proportional to size. This would encourage states to consolidate their votes into regional representations. Trade-based regional agreements, such as South American Mercosur, the African Continental Free Trade area, or the Association of South East Asian Nations, have the potential to transform into alliances focused on climate-related issues. This presents a significant opportunity for the EU to demonstrate leadership, drawing on its extensive experience in effectively coordinating national interests more than any other multilateral organization. It has the potential to set a precedent by consolidating its 27 seats into a single entity, demonstrating how its carbon border adjustments and other collective tools can transform ambition into tangible action. Drastically reducing the number of parties could facilitate the implementation of a high qualified majority (75% of the parties) to prevent a scenario akin to the UN’s Security Council, where the vetoes of merely five parties can lead to paralysis. This would also create opportunities for a more direct representation of essential interests. The current coalition of climate-vulnerable small island nations may secure a vote that surpasses their relatively small populations and GDPs. The C40 group of major cities may secure an institutionalised role. Young citizens’ assemblies have been the subject of extensive experimentation, and it is now time to grant them a formal vote. This would also compel their internal decision-making processes to become more transparent. Such a reform would be confined to the UN climate change conferences and, if successful, would be expanded to other UN decision-making processes.
Second, it is essential to organize the disordered collection of climate-related financial instruments. Recently, my colleagues and I identified approximately 30 facilities that connect developing and developed nations, aimed at financing climate projects, revealing significant overlap and confusion. One possibility would be to consolidate numerous small funds into three to five larger instruments. Only Germany and the UK, for instance, provide funding for ten of these facilities (with four of them being a collaborative effort). Every instrument emerging from the consolidation will be aligned with a broad objective that is easily comprehensible to all citizens, investors, and asset managers. One fund could be designated for adaptation, which encompasses the contentious issue of “loss and damage”; another for mitigation and energy transition; a third for financing research and development as well as technology sharing; and a fourth for promoting, evaluating, and scaling up experiments. Third, we must change the format of Cop itself. The expense of transporting and housing 100,000 delegates at Cop28 in Dubai likely exceeded the total financial commitments made during that same conference to aid poorer nations in addressing climate-related damages. The ratio of results to costs is a contributing factor to the decline in popular support for the climate agenda. One possibility is to transform Cop from a gigantic exhibition that changes location every year into five permanent forums (one for each main continent) focused on generating and managing knowledge on five problems that we need to solve.
They are: climate adaptation; climate mitigation; governance of areas that extend beyond national borders (oceans, Arctic, Antarctic); AI and climate; geoengineering (a last resort technology requiring robust global oversight). Distributing Cops around the world would sharpen the debate, facilitate participation, reduce costs and emissions, and could foster a continuous dialogue throughout the year instead of relying on a singular significant event. The governance of the climate is failing to deliver results. However, the climate might represent the most compelling issue for implementing a fundamentally new approach to global governance. It has the potential to serve as a model for the broader inquiry into how we can transform institutions that were designed for a different, far more stable time. And if we can rectify the way the world approaches climate decisions, we may also discover how to improve decision-making in all other areas.
