Road to COP28: Prospects and Challenges

1988 marked the year the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that prompted political action to react to climate change. Consequently, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was formulated, signed, and ratified in 1992.

Back then, major transformations affected the international system. These changes included,but were not limited to, the shift towards a multipolar world, emerging economies’ rising economic and political power, and the end of the Warsaw Pact (i.e., the communist bloc).

These dynamics affected every dimension of the climate change negotiations – one main transformation was a perceptible shift from problem-oriented approaches to solution- oriented ones. Three decades later, the focus is clearly on implementation, and financial issues are at the front seat. New challenges have emerged, whether in terms of mechanisms for implementation or on new dimensions of climate change. For instance, security has become another dimension of climate change. In short, the world is now a pluriform setting, and nations can no longer solely consider interactions with their neighbours but also consider the interrelations between national and extra-national political institutions, corporate, and civil society actors that co- produce the effects of the ‘global’ (Gomez- Echeverri, 2013). In this context, how geopolitics and geoeconomics are interlinked has set the tone for climate finance, how the new plurality of governance has targeted private actors that could offer their capabilities, and how developed and developing nations, along with great powers, react to the new international system are discussed within the climate regime, and subsequently their possible impacts on COP27 and COP28 were noted.

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Gokcenur Bay
Gokcenur Bay
Gökçenur Bay holds an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford, and BSc degrees in International Relations and Economics from the Middle East Technical University, with a semester at Sciences Po Paris. Her research interests include diplomacy and foreign policy, climate change, energy policy, and political economy.

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