Can global cooperation fight back against megatrends?

COP27, the UN’s climate summit, was a mixed occasion. Much as the summit delivered on some of its key objectives around loss and damage and adaptation, it failed to drive forward ambitions on the mitigation of climate change to a sufficient extent.

The final negotiations received a somewhat critical response from the environmental sector given the limited progress made towards net zero. Where COP26 opened the door to a more regular ratcheting-up of national commitments on mitigation, COP27 failed to seize that opportunity to double-down on progress. Currently, the global response to climate change is not sufficiently ambitious to amount to transformative change, and therefore climate is likely to remain a significant megatrend for years to come.

For the first time, however, substantial progress has been made on loss and damage, with recognition of the issue and some initial funding towards it. Past failings on loss and damage have made it difficult to find common ground to motivate action on mitigation, so moving past that barrier will be essential to addressing the long term trend of climate change. 

Meanwhile, initiatives like the Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda and the Global Shield Against Climate Risks have made more progress towards filling the gap on adaptation action and funding. Ultimately, even as climate change continues to dominate as one of the most significant megatrends we must consider, our ability to grapple with the consequences of that trend is increasing.

Read more about COP27 and its outcomes.

By contrast, COP15, the UN’s biodiversity summit, has broadly succeeded in its goals, giving us cause for optimism about global solutions to environmental challenges. After two years without the much-needed post-2020 global framework for biodiversity, COP15 has now agreed a ‘pact with nature’. Even in the face of prolonged negotiations that have failed to produce results in successive rounds of talks, there is now an agreement on the global ambition to protect 30% of the planet by the end of the decade.

Despite that progress, significantly more is still needed, and COP15 was not a perfect set of negotiations. More action will be needed to strengthen commitments on finance and implementation into real transformation of humanity’s relationship with nature. Different environmental bodies disagree on the extent to which the target for 30% protection of land and sea will encourage action on each system or only motivate atomistic approaches, potentially leading to unintended consequences. Those disagreements must be reconciled, and further progress on implementation will be required in future negotiations. Neither can wait until another decade has passed.

Ultimately, the agreement gives the global community an ambition to work towards, and a framework to help achieve that goal. It also addresses some interconnected issues like food waste and some forms of chemical pollution linked to agriculture. The challenge ahead will be for global action to realise the potential of the agreement and ensure it creates a better world for nature.

Read more about COP15 and why it matters.

Despite the ongoing scrutiny to achieve meaningful action on climate change, we should look at climate as one of the success stories of global environmental cooperation. The scale of the challenge often makes it seem like nothing has happened, yet significant steps have taken place over the past 50 years to encourage science-led action.

Major global institutions such as the UNFCCC and the IPCC have become the bedrock upon which climate action is pushed forwards, providing evidence and a common ground for negotiations. Though much more still needs to be done to address climate change on the global level, the enormous scale of work that has already taken place would not have been possible without global cooperation.

Other environmental crises have also seen success as a result of cooperation and global efforts. One example is the Montreal Protocol in the 1980s which sought to address the damage caused to the ozone layer by the use of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances (ODSs). Compared to 1990, global efforts have phased out 98% of ODSs, going a significant way to addressing the potential environmental harm. Ongoing cooperation will be needed to ensure that human activity such as the space industry does not pose a future threat to the ozone layer. 

Some environmental challenges have less positive or mixed messages on the success of global cooperation. It has taken a long time to coordinate global action on soil health, but initiatives like the World Congress of Soil Science are now actively increasing global collaboration to address the state of soils. The challenge for the future will be to ensure that scientific cooperation also manifests into political and economic action on a global scale.