With the benefit of hindsight: Currents 2024

Multilateral events and processes carried on in 2024, but its limitations were increasingly evident to participants and observers. UN negotiations confronted severe headwinds at key events intended to increase global commitments, actions and funding to limit climate change; protect biodiversity; stop desertification of land; and reduce the proliferation of plastics:

These efforts to reach consensus and accelerate change to address climate, environment and sustainable development goals  took place amid rising conflict, nationalism and populism. In November, the US elected Donald Trump, who has vowed to leave the Paris Agreement when he re-assumes the President’s office. Against this backdrop, activists increasingly turned to other potential avenues for change: levies and lawsuits.

Levies – The Global Solidarity Levies Task Force is mandated to explore the impact of a range of levies to finance development, nature and the fight against climate change. Subjects of interest include levies on carbon and fossil fuel damages, fossil fuel windfall profits, private air passengers, maritime fuel, and financial transactions; and the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies.

Lawsuits – Climate change litigation against companies is on the rise, as documented by a 2024 study by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

And in December, the International Court of Justice began hearing testimony in a landmark case, brought by Vanuatu and other vulnerable states. The testimony of James Hansen, who directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University, offered an indictment of the failures of multilateralism to avert “the greatest injustice in history”: climate change. As he said, “Climate change must be brought to the International Court of Justice because young people, developing nations, and Indigenous people have nowhere else to turn.”

His testimony included this withering observation of multilateral actions and processes:

“Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to ‘net zero’ at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate. Instead, there is dickering over potential payments to the most affected nations. Such illusory payments seem more immediate than long-term climate change, so they are dangled out front, like a carrot, as a bribe to continue business-as-usual. Meanwhile, real world emissions remain at a level driving climate inexorably toward conditions out of humanity’s control, leaving a global community increasingly unjust and ungovernable.”