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Environmental multilateralism in 2026: more robust than disruption narratives suggest


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in: Anna-Katharina Hornidge / Axel Berger (eds.), Disruption and Reform: sustainable futures at stake? The case for politics of cooperation and perseverance, Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), 39-44

ISBN: 978-3-96021-292-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.23661/r4.2026

Current disruptions to the rules-based international order, widely perceived as a resurgence of geopolitics, have placed multilateral governance under pressure. Environmental multilateralism is no exception, even as an interconnected ecological crisis comprising climate change, biodiversity and
ecosystem loss, and the degradation and pollution of vital land and water resources calls for far-reaching governance responses and structural transformations to safeguard the possibility of sustainable futures. If the yardstick for delivering the necessary transformations is the ability to avert and minimise global heating, mass extinction and plastic pollution (among other ecological risks), the record of multilateral environmental governance is mixed at best, even during less geopolitically charged times. While it has enabled a large and highly heterogeneous group of sovereign states to converge normatively around common environmental objectives, which is no mean feat, it has fallen significantly short of solving the world’s ecological problems. This implementation gap is widely recognised and supported by scientific evidence from intergovernmental scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It is therefore evident that multilateral environmental institutions warrant reform if they are to address global ecological challenges effectively. This was the case before the recent geopolitical disruption. However, that disruption – combined with environmentally harmful geoeconomic competition,  territorial conflicts over strategic land, water and mineral resources, and nationalist pushback against scientific evidence and environmental “restrictions” – makes progressive reform even more pressing (Bauer, 2026). We argue that the disruptive dynamics of current geopol-
itics constitute not only an imperative for reform, but also an opportunity to pursue it. This chance should be seized to enhance international cooperation through multilateral environmental institutions and to narrow evident implementation gaps by making those institutions more efficient
and effective. Aligning agendas and policy priorities across levels of governance and across the full range of pertinent multilateral environmental institutions will be an essential first step. Enhancing coordination between the three “Rio Conventions” – the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) – would provide an obvious starting point.

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