Ed in FT, part 16 Nov 2025 10:52
Now more than ever, leaders across the world face a choice: multilateralism or go it alone. Nowhere is the answer more stark than on the climate crisis, the ultimate collective action problem.
As we gather for COP30 in Brazil, consider an unfashionable thought: for all its frustrations, the COP climate summit is one of the best examples of successful multilateralism the world has ever known.
At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, countries came together on behalf of their citizens to make a historic affirmation — that the climate crisis was such a serious, urgent problem that a new global mechanism for annual action was necessary to tackle it.
This started an unprecedented experiment in accountability. In three decades of COPs, we have gone from a world heading to 4C or more of global warming to one of around 2.3-2.5C. From a world where zero emissions was inconceivable to one where 80 per cent of global GDP is covered by net zero targets. From a world where countries invested in fossil fuels as the future to one where investment in clean power is double that of fossil fuels — more was invested in solar last year than all other sources put together.
Of course, the COP process is deeply messy, and has many flaws: 197 countries negotiating how they transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is bound to be painful. I was at the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, which ended in acrimony in part because of mistrust between developing and developed countries, which persists to this day.
And yet, COP has acted as a global forcing mechanism — pushing countries to act, despite compelling constraints, in their own and the global interest. Would we have achieved such progress without this multilateral process? It’s doubtful.
Today, some voices at home want to write off the cause of climate action and undermine global co-operation to tackle it. That would be deeply irresponsible. We see the effects of the climate crisis all around us. The UK has been hit by four heatwaves this year; we’ve seen the devastating scenes of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean over the last week. If we abandoned global co-operation, we would be resigning ourselves to climate breakdown and all the instability and insecurity that comes with it.
But the case for action goes well beyond avoiding disaster — it is about better lives today. For the UK and so many others, clean energy is the route to energy security and to ending reliance on expensive fossil fuels in markets controlled by petrostates and dictators. A virtuous circle shows us the way: deployment of clean energy, such as wind and solar, plummeting costs and greater deployment. For the majority of the world, new renewables are cheaper than new fossil fuels.
For Britain, our exposure to fossil fuels led to the worst cost of living crisis in generations after Russia invaded Ukraine. We are price-takers not price-makers, with wholesale gas costs still 75 per cent higher than before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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