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It's a far cry from the hopeful days of 1987 when the world adopted a treaty that is now reversing the dangerous loss of stratospheric ozone by banning certain chemicals. That was followed by a 1992 Earth summit that set up a United Nations system for negotiating environmental problems, especially climate change called Conference of Parties or COPs. A flurry of these conferences in a row fell relatively flat.

The biodiversity COP in Cali, Colombia in October ran out of time, ending with no big agreement except to recognize Indigenous people's efforts. November's climate change COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, on paper reached its key goal of increasing financing for poor nations to cope with warming, but the limited amount left developing nations upset and analysts saying it wasn't nearly enough. A plastics pollution meeting in Busan, South Korea, the next week got many nations saying they wanted to do something, but didn't in the end. And the conference on desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia also failed to reach an agreement on how to deal with drought. "We can sum up all these four multilateral meetings of 2024 that we are still failing," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Nine years ago, when more than 190 nations came together to adopt the historic Paris agreement, countries had a mindset that realized a healthy planet benefitted every one, but "we've lost track of that," said former U.N. climate secretary Christiana Figueres, who shepherded that deal. "We're now entering as though we were gladiators in the Colosseum with an attitude of fighting and confrontation. And that mindset is not very productive."

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Thirty years ago when the climate conferences started there was debate over how decisions should be adopted.

A prominent fossil fuel industry lobbyist and Saudi Arabia pushed hard to kill the idea of majority or supermajority vote and instead adopt the idea of consensus so that every country more or less had to be on board, said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge at Cambridge University in England. "Through that they managed to stymie, to weaken the negotiations," Depledge said. The nature of consensus is "we end up moving at the pace of the slowest," said PowerShift Africa's Mohamed Adow. Gore, Depledge and others are advocating for new rules to make COP decisions by supermajority rule, not consensus. But past efforts have failed.

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https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-climate-biodiversity-plastics-drought-summits-failure-64b40bc06287a92d33bcdbfea4f3bf5f