After 30 Years of Negotiations, Have the UN Climate Talks Been a Failure?
Climate campaigners are calling for urgent reforms, including ending polluter influence and amplifying women’s voices.
Credit: Nancy Pelosi via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
With global temperatures and heat-trapping emissions continuing to rise along with escalating militarism and authoritarianism, climate campaigners and civil society organizations are calling for an overhaul in the international approach to addressing the climate crisis through annual United Nations (UN) negotiations, arguing the system has failed to deliver needed ambition and action.
“We are at a crossroads. For 30 years, the climate negotiations have systematically failed us,” Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said during a June 23 briefing held on the sidelines of the Bonn inter-sessional climate talks that wrapped up on Thursday. “The UN climate talks need an urgent and comprehensive reform.”
More than 200 organizations representing environmental advocates, children and youth interests, women and gender, disability rights, and Indigenous Peoples have issued a United Call for an Urgent Reform of the UN Climate Talks. The document outlines proposals for strengthening and restructuring the negotiations, including ending the infiltration of fossil fuel interests and allowing for majority-based decision-making to break through deadlocks that result from just a few countries blocking progress.
The UN climate negotiations have taken place pursuant to a global climate change treaty called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which aims to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system” through the stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Yet, GHG concentrations are now at their highest-ever levels and human activities – primarily combustion of fossil fuels – are already driving dangerous climate impacts. And the crisis is projected to get much, much worse. As One Earth Now reported last week, rates of global heating have increased and are now unprecedented.
Amidst this alarming scientific reality, it is completely rational to argue that the current approach to tackling the climate emergency has fallen short and warrants significant reforms. Last year, top climate experts reiterated their call for reforming the UNFCCC process.
The United Call from civil society organizations echoes and adds to the growing demands for major changes to the UN climate talks.
“For over 30 years, the UNFCCC has failed to deliver the action we need, because it has failed to protect these talks from the very polluters driving the crisis,” said Rachitaa Gupta, global coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. “What we are witnessing is not just delay. It is deliberate sabotage. And it has come at a deadly cost to our communities.”
Speaking during the June 23 briefing in Bonn, Gupta also acknowledged the current global context of intensifying conflicts, noting that the recent US and Israeli strikes against Iran and the ongoing genocide in Gaza are “not isolated incidents. They are part of a systemic pattern of militarism, colonial domination, and the weaponization of foreign policy to protect power, profit, and the empire.”
This pattern of exploitation is deeply intertwined with environmental injustice and climate breakdown, as Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), explained during a virtual Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice that took place June 23 – 28 to coincide with the second week of the Bonn climate conference.
“Research shows that everywhere in the world, where women have greater agency and political power, carbon emissions are lower and social and environmental policies are more effective. Yet women remain vastly underrepresented in climate negotiations and decision-making,” she said. “We can't separate the failure of governments to act ambitiously on climate from institutional patriarchy and the global rise in authoritarianism. And right now, this is playing out heavily in the United States. We are seeing rollbacks on environmental protections, attacks on reproductive rights, criminalization of peaceful protests, and disinformation campaigns targeting climate and racial justice. To build the healthy and just world that we want, we must amplify women’s voices not just as participants but as the architects of a thriving future.”
Zukiswa White, South African project specialist and social justice consultant, said that women leaders around the world remain steadfast in demanding climate justice even in the face of political headwinds and the ineffectiveness of the UN climate negotiations.
“Our work is to make climate justice outcomes a political inevitability,” White said. “Only our organizing allows us to stand a chance to fight the lethargy of the UNFCCC, which is currently not fit for purpose, and move into implementation of policies that not only halt devastation but also champion democratic, gender-transformative, and community-based solutions.”