Global Dialogues

For my generation, climate change has never felt hypothetical. It has shaped the world we grew up in and the one we’re expected to navigate. Unlike nuclear annihilation, climate change is not a danger waiting to be triggered. Left to its own devices, it will gradually strain food systems, fuel migration, and destabilize states through climate disasters. It’s an environmental existential threat, yes, but also a political and institutional one.

Since the adoption of the UNFCCC in 1992, global governance frameworks have identified pathways to combat climate change. Yet the persistent failure of these solutions highlights a broader failure by the international community. Existential threats persist not because we lack solutions, but because global governance frameworks still treat the Global South as recipients of aid rather than as partners in decision-making and implementation. This North/South binary undermines legitimacy, compliance, and effectiveness. If the international community is to properly assess and then work together to address these threats, cooperation must move beyond aid-based mitigation and embrace our shared vulnerability, responsibility, and diverse abilities.

For instance, our categorization of countries into Annex I, II, and Non-Annex I birthed a procedural power hierarchy between developed Annex I nations as providers of aid and leaders of action, and developing Annex II countries as recipients of aid, too “third world” to lead. We have relegated Annex II countries to the status of dependent” without the authority to control the terms of assistance. Despite the Annex system becoming less politically central since the Paris Agreement, it still shapes negotiating blocs and outcomes. This November, at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, negotiators failed to include any binding commitment to phase out fossil fuels, despite a coalition of more than 80 countries demanding a concrete roadmap. Opposition from petrostates diluted the agreement and sidelined the priorities of climate-vulnerable nations. COP30 is not an outlier. Its failure to recognize fossil fuels at a climate conference is the product of our tendency to invite those most affected into the room, relegate them to inconsequential but visible positions, and exclude them from the decision-making process while proclaiming inclusivity.

For the international community to work effectively together to address existential threats, we must reform governance frameworks like the UNFCCC that overtly prioritize the will of developed nations while silencing the voices of those who bear the brunt of climate change. This is not a straightforward solution; industrialized nations are often those with the most resources to finance the fight against climate change. However, it starts with implementing procedural reforms, such as codifying voting procedures. Unanimous consent at the UNFCCC has allowed power-wielding nations and their lobbyists to obstruct progress. Priority cannot be given to sustaining oil-based economic growth in industrialized nations when it threatens the very existence of frontline actors such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Addressing climate change at an existential scale requires international governance structures that recognize mutual vulnerability and responsibility and treat all states not as donors or recipients but as equal stakeholders in our shared planetary future.

C. Breck DuPaul (SFS'29) is a freshman in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.