Environmental Internationalism Is in Its Flop Era

This year is set to break the record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was a banner year for climate devastation: Southern Africa and South America suffered under severe droughts; dangerous heat bore down on large parts of Asia, Europe, and Central America; and an alarming number of wildfires consumed more than 1 million hectares in Brazil. Hurricanes, intensified by abnormally hot seawater, pummeled the Caribbean and the American Southeast, and floods deluged parts of Africa and Europe. The Arctic tundra, once a sink for carbon emissions, is officially thawed and sufficiently wildfire-prone to become a source of them.

Despite all of that, this year in international environmental diplomacy went exceptionally badly. Inflation and cost-of-living crises, coupled with a rightward shift in politics in many countries, meant that negotiating for major environmental spending this year was poised to be difficult. But environmental diplomacy has also reached a hard new crossroads: The science of ecological destruction is settled, the trajectory is bleak, and the need for change is obvious. All that’s left to do is decide who should deal with it.

The diplomatic season began with Colombia hosting the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in October; that meeting seeks to stanch the loss of ecosystems and species across the world. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, and its leftist president is keen on weaning the country off fossil fuels and reducing deforestation. But even with Colombia’s motivated leadership, the conference ended in disappointment as the gathered nations failed to agree on how biodiversity-conservation targets would be monitored or paid for.

In November, the more than 170 countries that gathered in Busan, South Korea, for what was meant to be the fifth and final round of UN plastic-pollution treaty talks failed to reach a deal. The impasse came down, once again, to who would bear the costs of curtailing the problem. In this case, more than 100 countries wanted measures to curb the production of plastic, rather than just finding new ways to clean up plastic waste. But that would mean jeopardizing the revenue of the plastic-making industry, and petroleum-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia (plastic is mostly made from oil and gas), pushed against those measures, blocking a deal. The plastic treaty will try again next year.

The blockbuster event, however, was the UN’s annual climate conference, where the wealthy nations historically responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions were meant to commit real money to fund developing countries’ response. Economists said they’d need at least $1 trillion a year. As one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, the United States might be expected to be a major contributor to the pool of money dedicated to slowing climate change and mitigate its effects.  But the U.S. has always been an unreliable partner in global climate agreements, and Donald Trump’s election last month, shortly before the conference began, meant that any financial contribution from the U.S. in the near future was predicted to be zero dollars. “That obviously made a lot of the developed countries very concerned to promise numbers that they can’t deliver on,” Linda Kalcher, the executive director of the European climate think tank Strategic Perspectives, told me. Some of the donor countries are in the middle of an inflation and cost-of-living crisis, she noted. In the end, the countries agreed to just $300 billion in climate finance a year by 2035, a fraction of the necessary total.

Beyond the U.S., far-right populist parties are gaining footholds in Europe, and they’re inclined to frame climate finance as “money that’s been donated to other countries at the cost of not renovating your schools,” Kalcher said. “It’s really a difficult political setting” for the big project of climate internationalism. The UN climate negotiations need countries that benefit from fossil fuels to sign onto agreements, too, but in recent years, their influence has slowed progress enough that some observers have argued that the whole process is breaking. Energy lobbyists are now always on the conference’s roster; Al Gore has called setting these meetings in petrostates such as the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan “absurd.” During this year’s negotiations, a group that included former diplomacy leaders sent a letter to the UN urging it to reform key aspects of the negotiations, including who is allowed to attend.

Kalcher, who has worked as a senior adviser for the UN secretary-general on climate issues, said she still believes in the process: After all, no other venue exists where countries can hash out deals on climate matters and the least-developed, most climate-stricken ones have a seat at the table with the industrial behemoths. But for right now, climate internationalism is in a sorry state.

Arguably, the project of environmental internationalism has reached the most difficult part of the problems it’s been tasked with. The main question left to answer is who should pay to stave off the worst of climate change’s ravages. When climate negotiations started more than 30 years ago, the science of climate change had begun to resolve some of the most important uncertainties about the planet’s future; now science has produced broad consensus on the cause and general trajectory of climate change. It’s a simple fact that many countries will flounder without major funding from wealthy countries, and suffer enormous consequences from climate changes they did not cause. Prior eras of climate diplomacy were focused on hammering out the basic contours of the climate problem, and agreeing that it must be addressed; now the world is at the point where meaningfully altering the trajectory of ecological decline requires transitioning the world off fossil fuels, which will require fossil-fuel economies to radically change.

Likewise, protecting biodiversity will require major changes to an economic system that values industries such as tourism and timber more than mangroves and rainforests. And curbing plastics will require curbing plastic production, an industry now deeply embedded in almost every aspect of global commerce and tied to the system of subsidies and state support for fossil fuels. One way or another, addressing these problems will require deep economic reforms. Of course, making them could ensure the future habitability of the planet, which comes with its own obvious economic benefits.

A few glimmers of hope for environmental diplomacy do remain. In the final weeks of his presidency, Joe Biden is pushing forward an agreement in which the U.S. and the 37 other well-off countries at the OECD would effectively stop using their export-credit agencies to fund fossil-fuel projects overseas. This decision would deprive the fossil-fuel economy of one source of backing, and eliminate one of the only remaining ways that the U.S. government supports international oil-and-gas development. It would change nothing about the U.S.’s position as the world’s largest current producer of oil and exporter of gas, but it would potentially eliminate billions of dollars in future funding for such projects overseas. And, unlike financial commitments made at the UN climate conference, this decision would put rules in place that proponents say would be hard for the incoming Trump administration to undo. It would be a step toward a modicum of climate safety.

The world will meet again next year, in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th iteration of the UN climate talks. By then, Trump will be in office and will have likely started the process to withdraw the U.S. from the climate bargaining table. The past year’s paltry outcome will surely cast a shadow over relations between developed and undeveloped countries, the most imperiled of which view the weak finance deal as a betrayal of trust. China, the world’s largest current emitter of greenhouse gases, as well as the largest producer of clean-energy technology, may step into the vacuum of power the U.S. will have left behind, or it may not. Other major oil-producing countries, emboldened by the withdrawal of the Americans, may dilute whatever show of climate solidarity they’ve previously made.

This impasse comes just when warming is accelerating faster in some areas even than scientists expected, and the physical threats it poses are reaching dangerous new heights of severity. But global diplomacy remains the world’s best idea to address a global problem. Countries will still come together, and they will try to make some progress, because for many of them in desperate climatic straits, there is simply no other choice. Either we figure this out, or we live with the consequences.