In recent months, critics have renewed attacks claiming that the United Nations climate negotiations are broken beyond repair. Bjørn Lomborg has long dismissed the COP process as a ‘circus’ of non-binding pledges. Alex Epstein says restricting fossil fuel use in developing countries is ‘immoral’. Even insiders like Christiana Figueres and Mary Robinson warn that weak targets and unmet finance promises risk eroding the legitimacy of the process.
Yet the paradox of multilateral climate diplomacy is that it only works when countries fear failure enough to stretch themselves. That pressure – so evident in the run-up to 2015’s Paris Agreement, the only modern treaty adopted by nearly 200 countries – remains essential today. While deeply flawed, the UN climate process remains a foundation the world cannot afford to discard.
Stubborn realities
Frustrations are real. The current consensus model for climate negotiations is slow, accountability is thin, and summits often end in lowest-common-denominator deals. But critics miss three stubborn realities.
First, no other forum has the universality of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Even sceptical BRICS nations reaffirm it as the only legitimate global venue. Second, dismantling the regime would discard mechanisms and diplomacy that have been developed over decades to make coordinated climate action possible. Third, the Framework does not block progress elsewhere. Initiatives from the Global Methane Pledge to Just Energy Transition Partnerships flourished alongside it.
International pressures on the process are greater than ever. Energy shocks, inflation, and resurgent nationalism have tempted leaders to slow-walk net zero pledges. Many developing countries are pushing back against climate targets, with African nations such as Nigeria or Mozambique emphasizing gas development despite COP28’s agreement to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’. And Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East sap political attention.
In the US, Europe and elsewhere, climate, energy and trade policies are all caught up in culture wars. Right-wing factions frame decarbonization as elitist, while public resistance to ‘green mandates’ grows even as floods, wildfires, and heatwaves intensify. There is a real danger that climate cooperation becomes another proxy battlefield in wider ideological and geopolitical struggles.
The return of Donald Trump to the US presidency means the US has withdrawn from the process entirely. The Trump administration could even seek to sabotage it, crushing funding and stalling momentum on critical initiatives – having stated that Paris and agreements like it ‘do not reflect our country’s values’.
Yet the process has already proven it can survive US absence. When Washington failed to implement the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and President Trump first announced a US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017, negotiations continued among other countries. In many ways, global resolve hardened.
Today’s world is different again: climate leadership is more dispersed. The EU, China, India, Japan, and vulnerable states are all shaping the agenda. That resilience underlines why dismantling the UNFCCC would be folly: it is bigger than any one capital.
The need for evolution
The complex challenges the process faces make it easy to forget how much has already shifted. Against long odds, nations agreed in 2015 to act collectively on an issue that would affect the core of their economic models. Before Paris, the world was heading toward 4–5°C of warming.
Today, thanks to successive rounds of diplomacy, current pledges – though insufficient – have bent the curve to around 2.5–3°C. COP28’s language on ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels, unthinkable just years ago, shows what leaders consider possible has changed.
