Nearly three decades after the first UN climate conference, emissions are still rising. The global system for tackling climate change is broken – it’s slow, cumbersome and undemocratic.
Even Donald Trump may not be totally wrong when he blames the UN for producing “empty words and then never [following] those words up”. If we assess the progress since the first UN Cop climate summit in 1995, the numbers on emissions confirm that not very much did, indeed, follow years of words.
We urgently need not just to redesign climate policies but also a new method for drafting those polices. Climate change could even be the right issue in which to experiment with an approach that might inspire a wider reform of multinational institutions.
