Around five years remain to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet the progress is still looking dismal (Council on Foreign Relations, 2023). That is especially notable for SDG 13 (UN, n.d.), which urges countries to take action to fight the dangers of climate change. Transgressing the 1.5°C threshold in 2024 compared to the pre-industrial era (Bardan, 2025), the science urging against the negative effects of global warming become more relevant given the intensification of extreme weather events. Yet, some countries still continue to disregard much-needed changes in their behavior or simply go the opposite of sustainability practices by prioritizing short-term economic goals over the long-term future.
Dynamics of the climate negotiations within the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a great way to measure global progress (Blinova, Emuru, Bagozzi, 2024). COP is the supreme decision-making body of the Convention (UNFCCC, n.d.) that serves as a main platform for dialogue and cooperation for representatives of countries that are part of the Convention. Yet, despite the growing climate problem, cooperation between countries is far from perfect and, at minimum, is complicated.
On the one side, there is a clear North-South divide between the countries within these COPs (Penetrante, 2011). This, as such, inhibits the democratic process of negotiations and undermines fairness in accessing important funds by the developing countries that are controlled by the developed world. This also perpetuates global injustice and unevens the power dynamics between different states. On the other, fragmentation exists (Castro and Klöck, 2020) within each camp as well since each country looks at cooperation through the realist lens of its own needs and interests rather than through the lens of collective action. Hence, the architecture of the global climate forum is highly uneven, which not only impedes countries from reaching agreements on basic problems but also prevents larger progress in curbing the changing climate.
The most recent example of COP29, held in the petrostate Azerbaijan, illustrates the point. The ambiguity of the position from the Global North to the challenges experienced by the Global South once again impeded productive negotiations. That said, the problem with the allocation of climate finance to developing countries by developed ones and the commitments of the latter group produced many debates. While the final agreement was reached to mobilize $300 billion annually for developing countries (Hill and Mahat, 2024), the outcome is barely acceptable to them for preventing threats to climate change.
The controversial element of global climate talks thus collides with the ethical issue of economic prosperity (Wolf, 2020), where the rich countries prefer to protect their economic interests at the expense of worsening climate, and poor countries do not have much leverage within the talks due to lack of economic power. In addition, larger economies and the top five emitters of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) such as the US, China, and India have not done enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals. Contrary, their experience clearly demonstrates that domestic economic growth and internal politics are prioritized over the world’s urgent needs.
Given these complexities in climate negotiations and the inability to agree on minimal actions, the logical question arises: is the world ready to meet the challenges of climate change in the near future? The answer is obvious – definitely not. If it did, then the fulfillment of SDG 13 would be on the horizon, and 2024 would not be the warmest year in history. Piling evidence of environmental disasters (Bett, 2025), such as the deadliest hurricanes in North America, flooding and mudslides in South America, devastating drought and abnormal precipitations in Africa and the Middle East, and other instances of shifting climatic events demonstrate that some countries do not seem to be in a rush to agree on the urgent collective actions.
On the contrary, we may observe that some ignore the problem and even damage the environment despite knowing where the world is heading. Russia, another world’s largest emitter, is a good example of a tragic story. Russia’s economic dependency on natural resources, and mostly on oil and gas, determines its course of action. That being said, this dependency is one of the reasons why its domestic climate policies are ambiguous and efforts insufficient (Climate Action Tracker, n.d.). While being one of the top five emitters, Russian officials oppositely emphasize the positive effect of climate change that it has on the country while neglecting the real dangerous impact. They claim that global warming will decrease energy use in cold regions, expand agricultural areas, and open navigational opportunities in the Arctic (The Guardian, 2020). Yet, being also a large agricultural producer, Russia, in fact, experiences a number of impacts and is poorly prepared to mitigate or adapt to new realities (Wengle and Javeline, 2024).
On the other hand, China also largely ignores the threat of climate change despite its suffering from pollution, environmental degradation, and weather anomalies (Maizland, 2021). At large, the country has the potential to undertake a top-down sustainable policy through a centralized approach to finding solutions, given its crackdown on civil society activism. Yet, as some note “like many other issues in China, climate change basically is used as an issue by media to glorify the state and the supreme leader and also to attack the United States and other Western countries” (Pollard, 2023).
Hence, climate change becomes a failing policy in the hands of the politicians rather than an actionable remedy for improvements. India is yet another example where many farmers feel the impact of extreme weather patterns that affect crop damage. Yet the government undertakes insufficient efforts to address the problem and even downplays its true effect prioritizing politics over the problems (Ahmad, 2024).
In many other countries, there are similar and additional issues that hinder the implementation of climate policies. These are political and institutional challenges, technological, economic, social, and cultural. For instance, in the US, right-wing supporters contribute to the discourse of ‘global hoax’ in the context of ‘global warming’ and only 12% of Republicans believe climate change should be a priority (Kennedy and Tyson, 2024). In Brazil, on the other hand, indigenous people traditionally dependent on the Amazon rainforest are at odds with combating deforestation practices or modernizing climate policies (WWF, n.d.). Other nations have their multicausal dynamics impeding progress in the world’s collective actions. Given each country’s unique experience, its place in the international system, domestic challenges, and diverging vested interests, the potential of global climate negotiations does not look bright.
While there are opportunities for success in global climate talks and some progress has been made, it is obvious that the fight against climate threats requires global cooperation to overcome the aforementioned challenges. This is even harder to achieve under the anarchic structure of the international system and nonbinding commitments that lack enforcement mechanisms.
That said, until nations reconcile their differences and reach the point of actionable climate policies, the future of rising temperatures and their effect on people around the world will continue to pose serious risks. Hence, it is important to make every effort towards a more sustainable future against uncertainties. No action is too small, knowing the risks are too big.
References
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About author:
Daria Blinova is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her research interests intersect between IR, comparative politics, and research methods fields. Her main focus is autocratic regime survival, foreign and domestic policy of Russia, environmental politics, as well as international development.
