Can UN summits save the planet? A faltering year of talks brings up questions about the process

The world’s nations keep faltering in their efforts to join together to save the planet from several environmental crises.
In the past few months United Nations-sponsored negotiations to tackle climate change, plastic pollution, loss of global species and a growing number of deserts have either outright failed or come out with limited outcomes that didn’t address the scale of the problems. It’s been three years since activist Greta Thunberg dismissed global talks as “blah-blah-blah,” which became a rallying cry for young environmentalists.
“If you are not feeling some kind of grief about what’s going on, you’re obviously not understanding what’s going on,” said climate negotiations veteran analyst Alden Meyer of the European think-tank E3G. He said he’s been watching humanity “collectively fail as a species.”
The Associated Press interviewed more than 20 experts and they called multilateral environmentalism broken because of a cumbersome consensus process, the power of the fossil fuel industry, geopolitical changes and the massive size of the problems they are trying to fix.
Progress is being made, especially on climate change, but it’s too little, too slow and in stutter steps, United Nations officials and others said.
“Is it frustrating? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes,” said United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen. But it is the “only way” in which smaller and poorer nations get a seat at the table with powerful rich countries, she said. “I wouldn’t classify it as an outright failure.”
Failed meetings It’s a far cry from the hopeful days of 1987 when the world adopted a treaty that is now reversing the dangerous loss of stratospheric ozone by banning certain chemicals. That was followed by a 1992 Earth summit that set up a United Nations system for negotiating environmental problems, especially climate change called Conference of Parties or COPs. A flurry of these conferences in a row fell relatively flat.
The biodiversity COP in Cali, Colombia in October ran out of time, ending with no big agreement except to recognize Indigenous people’s efforts. November’s climate change COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, on paper reached its key goal of increasing finance for poor nations to cope with warming, but the limited amount left developing nations upset and analysts saying it wasn’t nearly enough. A plastics pollution meeting in Busan, South Korea, the next week got many nations saying they wanted to do something, but didn’t in the end. And the conference on desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia also failed to reach an agreement on how to deal with drought.
“We can sum up all these four multilateral meetings of 2024 that we are still failing,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Nine years ago, when more than 190 nations came together to adopt the historic Paris agreement, countries had a mindset that realized a healthy planet benefitted every one, but “we’ve lost track of that,” said former UN climate secretary Christiana Figueres, who shepherded that deal. “We’re now entering as though we were gladiators in the Colosseum with an attitude of fighting and confrontation. And that mindset is not very productive.”
A broken system Panama lead negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey was part of all four meetings and said the entire system is “fundamentally broken.”
“It feels like we have lost our way, not only as countries and governments, but as humanity. It feels like we no longer care for each other,” Monterrey said from the desert meeting in Riyadh.
Monterrey said he thinks countries like his are going to have fight environmental problems on their own or with just small groups of nations. Others are embracing the idea of ” climate clubs ” which is a group of countries working together, but not quite the whole world.
“We need to find alternative pathways,” Harjeet Singh, of the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty said, pointing to a climate case before the International Court of Justice. Figueres said one group of lawyers has filed 140 climate change-oriented legal actions in courts across the world.
“The UN system is the worst system except for all the others. They don’t have another,” former Ireland President Mary Robinson, a member of the advocacy group The Elders, told The Associated Press.
But former US Vice President Al Gore said: “We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Problems with consensus Thirty years ago when the climate conferences started there was debate over how decisions should be adopted.
A prominent fossil fuel industry lobbyist and Saudi Arabia pushed hard to kill the idea of majority or supermajority vote and instead adopt the idea of consensus so that every country more or less had to be on board, said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge at Cambridge University in England.
“Through that they managed to stymie, to weaken the negotiations,” Depledge said.
These nature of consensus is “we end up moving at the pace of the slowest,” said PowerShift Africa’s Mohamed Adow.
Gore, Depledge and others are advocating for new rules to make COP decisions by supermajority rule, not consensus. But past efforts have failed.
“Multilateralism isn’t dead, but it is being held hostage by a very small number of countries trying to prevent progress,” Gore said. “There’s no greater example of this than the way that the fossil fuel industry has hijacked policymaking at all levels.”
For 27 years, climate negotiations agreements never specifically mentioned “fossil fuels” as the cause of global warming, nor called for their elimination. Then after sharp fights last year in Dubai, it called for a transition away from fossil fuels.
A changing world Part of the problem is that in the 1980s there were two superpower nations and they had “enough common interest among themselves to knock heads together and to make something happen,” said Princeton University climate scientist and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer.
Now, “the world is much more fractured and power is much more diversified,” Depledge said. “Everybody is shouting with their own national circumstances.”
But at the same time, those shouting nations – and businesses and the economy in general – are doing much more at home to fight climate change regardless of what’s done at COPs, Figueres said.
Former top US negotiator Jonathan Pershing, now environment program director at the Hewlett Foundation, points to “the long arc” of enormous progress made. (The Associated Press receives support for climate coverage from Hewlett).
UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell told AP, “Let’s not forget that without UN-convened global cooperation, we would be headed for up to 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) of global heating (above pre-industrial levels) – a death sentence for most of humanity.”
All the experts told The that they still have hope – either because of or despite what’s happened so far.
“To be hopeless is to give up on the lives of people today,” said climate activist Mitzi Jonelle Tan. “To be hopeless is to give up on my family, on our experiences here. To give up is to give up life.”