Why climate summits fail and 3 urgent ways to make them work better

Nearly three decades after the first UN climate conference, emissions are still rising. The global system for tackling climate change is broken – it’s slow, cumbersome and undemocratic.

Even Donald Trump may not be totally wrong when he blames the UN for producing “empty words and then never [following] those words up”. If we assess the progress since the first UN Cop climate summit in 1995, the numbers on emissions confirm that not very much did, indeed, follow years of words.

We urgently need not just to redesign climate policies but also a new method for drafting those polices. Climate change could even be the right issue in which to experiment with an approach that might inspire a wider reform of multinational institutions.

A conference I have helped organise beginning October 16 in Venice on the global governance of climate change will discuss three ideas.

First, we need to gradually redesign the decision-making process to solve a deficit of both efficiency and democracy. Decisions today are slow and weak because they de facto seek unanimity.

The Paris agreement, for instance, only required 55 countries producing at least 55% of global emissions to enter into force. And yet diplomats worked so that it could be agreed by all 195 UN member states – including those that later dropped out – by adopting words that tend to be “empty” to avoid displeasing anybody.

At the same time, the process does not even include all the parties that really matter: technically, the microstate of San Marino is one of the signatories of the agreements; the megacity of Los Angeles is not. Current mechanisms also miss the opportunity to experiment with direct representation of groups for whom climate change matters more, such as young people, indigenous people or farmers.

One idea would be to leverage the relative concentration of the world economy. China, the US and India represent almost half of the world population (and much of the population living below the global poverty line), more than half of the GDP and emissions; and most of the private investment in artificial intelligence that may enable some of the most interesting solutions.

Reforms that go beyond current blanket consensus are necessary. For instance, some experts have proposed a qualified majority voting system, in which changes might require a supermajority of countries or perhaps a majority of both developed and developing countries.

But we must be even more ambitious than this: voting rights should instead reflect size.

This would create incentives for states to move towards pooling their votes into regional representations. Trade-based regional agreements, like South American Mercosur, the African Continental Free Trade area or the Association of South East Asian Nations could evolve into climate-related alliances.

This would be a gigantic opportunity for leadership by the EU, which has accumulated more hard-earned experience than any other multilateral organisation in how to pool national wills. It could set an example by merging its 27 seats into one, showing how its carbon border adjustments and other collective instruments can translate ambition into action.

Drastically reducing the number of parties could allow for the introduction of a high qualified majority (75% of the parties) to avoid a situation like the UN’s security council where vetoes of just five parties is enough for paralysis.

This would also open space for a more direct representation of vital interests. The existing alliance of climate-vulnerable small island states could get a vote that outweighs their modest populations and GDPs. The C40 group of major cities could get an institutionalised role.

Young citizens assemblies have long been experimented with and it is time to give them a formal vote. This would also force, in turn, their internal decision-making processes to be more transparent. Such a reform would be limited to the UN climate change conferences and if successful be scaled up to other UN decision-making process.  

Simplify climate finance

Second, it is necessary to streamline the chaotic array of climate-related financial instruments. Colleagues and I recently counted about 30 facilities bridging developing and developed countries and meant to finance climate projects, with much overlap and confusion.

One possibility would be to merge many small funds into three to five bigger instruments. Only Germany and UK, for instance, fund ten of such facilities (and four of them are a joint effort). Each of the instruments resulting from the consolidation would be dedicated to a big-picture goal that every citizen, investor and asset manager can immediately understand.

There could be one fund for adaptation (including the problematic “loss and damage”); one for mitigation (and energy transition); one for financing research and development, and technology sharing; and one for encouraging, assessing and scaling up experiments.

Reinvent the Cop format

Third, we absolutely need to change the format of Cop itself. The cost of flying and accommodating 100,000 delegates at Cop28 in Dubai was probably higher than the total amount promised at that same Cop to compensate poorer countries for climate-related losses. This results-to-cost ratio is one reason why the climate agenda has lost some popular support.

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 places that are beyond national boundaries (oceans, Arctic, Antarctic); AI and climate; geoengineering (a last resort technology in need of strong global control).

Distributing Cops around the world would focus the debate, make participation easier, cut costs and emissions, and could sustain a year-round dialogue rather than a single big moment.

Governance of the climate is not working. Yet the climate may be the best problem against which to apply a radically new method of global governance. It may become a blueprint for the much wider question of how we reinvent institutions that were conceived for a different, much more stable era.

And if we can fix how the world decides on climate, we might learn to fix how it decides on everything else, too.