‘Systematically Failed’: Civil Society’s Latest Attempt to Reform UN Climate Talks

From Pacific Island students to executives at global organizations like Greenpeace, a wide swath of people are losing patience with the slow and often uneven international process for reining in climate change. 

This week, more than 200 civil society and Indigenous peoples’ groups released a joint statement calling for major reforms, from how decisions are made to changes involving corporate involvement. 

The letter came as countries were meeting in Germany to prepare for the 30th annual Conference of the Parties (COP), the decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC for short. 

The talks in Germany were the first without an official U.S delegation, as my colleague Bob Berwyn reported last week.

The joint statement is the result of years of frustration with the COP format and its inability to address climate justice concerns. 

“We have seen the COP process deteriorating over the years,” said Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner for human rights and climate change at the Center for International Environmental Law, a group that signed and helped coordinate the statement. “We see an ever-growing COP that is not all leading to more inclusivity or action.” 

That frustration was echoed at the climate talks in Germany that wrapped up Thursday. Representatives of countries most threatened by climate catastrophes warned that nations aren’t moving fast enough to address the compounding crises from an overheating planet.

“Every fraction of a degree matters,” said Evans Njewa, chair of the United Nations group of Least Developed Countries.

Finance Frustration: Advocates see COP29, held in Azerbaijan last year, as a case in point for their reform push. 

Dubbed “the finance COP,” the summit was supposed to galvanize wealthy countries most responsible for climate change to increase the money they provide developing countries to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. 

That would update developed countries’ 2009 pledge to provide or mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020, an amount that might sound enormous but that falls far short of the climate costs developing nations are grappling with. Meanwhile, developed countries didn’t hit that target until 2022 and fell short of promises in other ways, the Center for Global Development found in an analysis last year. 

Enter COP29. Developing countries requested $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 to help transition to clean energy and make adaptations to get ahead of the rapidly warming planet’s mounting consequences. In the final hours of negotiation, that was cut to $300 billion, with $1.3 trillion mentioned in summit documents as an aspirational goal for later. 

“The UNFCCC has reached a critical breaking point,” this week’s letter reads. “Climate negotiations have systematically failed to deliver climate justice and undermined international law.” 

The call for reform focuses on five changes:

• Switching to majority-based decision-making. The current consensus-based process requiring full agreement allows the largest polluters to water down outcomes, the letter’s signers say. “The climate process must no longer be held hostage by the narrow interests of a few,” the coalition writes.The group also wants COPs led only by host countries demonstrating “tangible progress” on climate action. Recent summits in petrostates, like the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, drew intense criticism for their conflicts of interests. 

• Stopping “corporate capture.” Fossil fuel companies and other major contributors to climate change increasingly dominate COPs. The coalition wants “strong accountability framework to protect against corporate interest and those with vested interests,” and no more commercial partnerships. (Ninety percent of COP29’s sponsors had fossil-fuel ties, one analysis found.)

• Upping accountability. Since the ratification of the Paris Agreement, developing nations have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of enforceability of international obligations. The coalition believes compliance can be improved through incentives for action and penalties for failure. The group also wants to bring climate negotiations out from behind closed doors. 

• Protecting human rights. In the lead up to COP29, Azerbaijan arrested more than 30 journalists, activists and human rights defenders. During the conference, organizers created strict protest zones to control activist mobility and speech. The coalition says the UNFCCC must “ensure that COP hosts uphold international human rights standards, particularly freedom of expression and peaceful protest.” 

Repeated Asks for Reform: This is not the first time people have demanded COP reform.  

Inside Climate News’ Berwyn, who reports on the COPs, has documented the mounting frustrations of activists and civil society groups for years. During COP29 in November, he wrote about a high-profile letter signed by people including former UNFCCC leader Christiana Figueres, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland. Previous calls for reform have met with little success, however. 

“Most of the things that are in this statement have been raised at some point over the past 30 years but have gone away over time,” the Center for International Environmental Law’s Vandamme told me, referring to this week’s letter. “This is the first time all the different elements and demands have come together in one place, and under a united front.”

Most changes to the process would have to come through that process itself. This means UNFCCC member states must all agree on any proposed changes—which makes sweeping reform difficult or impossible. 

I reached out to the UNFCCC for comments about the coalition’s demands and any plans the institution may have to change the climate talks, but I didn’t get a reply. 

COP30 will be held in Brazil this November. Vandamme hopes organizers will consult with the coalition as they plan the talks and create a conflict of interest policy. 

With extreme heat, hurricanes, wildfires, drought and other climate consequences worsening, there’s no time to waste, the coalition believes.

“Global climate governance is increasingly perceived as out of touch, driven by vested interests, and running out of relevance and trust,” they write. “The time is now for the UNFCCC to become the climate regime it should have been for the past decades: one centered around international law and obligations to prevent dangerous climate change.”

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