From Rio de Janeiro (1992) to Paris (2015) to the Future: Why is international cooperation on climate change so difficult to achieve and will it get easier?

Just as countries seemed to be turning a corner at Paris, COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting instability in energy markets have drawn attention elsewhere. Meanwhile, at the Glasgow Climate Summit (2021), negotiators had to face yet another politically complex and confounding aspect of the climate issue -- “loss and damage” to the world’s poorest countries due to climate change. Has international cooperation on climate change reached a dead end? Will other concerns continually push it off center stage, delaying a successful global effort to solve the problem and exposing humanity to ever greater climate risk? What have we learned about treaty-making on climate change over the past 30-plus years that should make us either optimistic or pessimistic about international cooperation?

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