Stewart Patrick
Carnegie’s Global Order and Institutions Program identifies promising new multilateral initiatives and frameworks to realize a more peaceful, prosperous, just, and sustainable world. That mission has never been more important, or more challenging. Geopolitical competition, populist nationalism, economic inequality, technological innovation, and a planetary ecological emergency are testing the rules-based international order and complicating collective responses to shared threats. Our mission is to design global solutions to global problems.Learn More
A critical United Nations summit to preserve the future of life on Earth ended in disarray earlier this month, after two weeks of exhausting negotiations. The meeting in Cali, Colombia, was intended to be a milestone in global efforts to slow and ultimately reverse the dramatic, human-caused destruction of species and ecosystems worldwide. Despite some important breakthroughs, the event fell far short of the organizers’ aspirations, deferring critical issues and raising grave doubts about the international community’s commitment to end what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes as humanity’s “suicidal war against nature.” The outcome of the U.S. presidential election, whose victor describes climate change as a “hoax,” only reinforces pessimism about the fate of the living planet.
The Road to COP16
Like many other global initiatives, this event involved an alphabet soup of frameworks, agreements, and parties. This sixteenth conference of parties (COP16) stands in the shadow of its more famous sibling COP, despite attracting 23,000 delegates across governments, academia, and civil society. Though also deeply tied to climate, this biennial COP gathers the 196 parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). (The sibling, this year called COP29, kicked off this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, with the leaders of the world’s major polluters opting not to attend.)
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