Geopolitical uncertainties make the climate crisis harder to solve

Global power is fractured. Temperatures have risen to record levels. Bitterness and anxiety are rising in vulnerable countries lashed by deadly heat and floods.

This week, as presidents and prime ministers assemble at the United Nations General Assembly, they confront a vastly different world from the one that existed nearly 10 years ago, when nations rich and poor found a way to rally together around a remarkable global pact.

In that accord, the 2015 Paris Agreement, they promised to act and acknowledged a bare truth: Climate change threatens all of us, and we owe it to each other to slow it down. Countries agreed to nudge each other to raise their climate ambitions every five years, and the industrialised nations of the world – which had prospered from the burning of coal, oil and gas – said they would help the rest of the world prosper without burning down the planet.

Turns out, geopolitics can be as unpredictable as the weather. Three big things have shifted since the climate accord that, together, have sunk the prospects of global climate cooperation to a low point.

China has raced ahead of every other country, including the United States, to dominate the global clean-energy supply chain, fuelling serious economic and political strains that undermine incentives to cooperate.

Rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from fossil fuels.

A widening gyre of war – from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip and now, in Lebanon – has become an impediment to global climate consensus.

“Major emitting countries are much less likely to work cooperatively on climate due to geopolitical tensions and concerns about supply-chain security than they were in 2015,” said former White House adviser Kelly Sims Gallagher, who is now dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Then there is the biggest, most consequential uncertainty of all: the coming US elections.