Today, the 64th session of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies (SB64) opens at Bonn's World Conference Center. Over 5,000 delegates, government negotiators, and civil society representatives gather here to prepare COP31, taking place later this year in Turkey. The Subsidiary Bodies are the engine room of global climate diplomacy, where technical groundwork is laid, positions are negotiated, and coalitions are built. Both, party delegates and non-party stakeholders are formally welcome – but participants from the Global South face a range of obstacles to participation: accreditation, travel costs, accommodation, and visas. The latter is distinct as it could be addressed directly by Germany as permanent UNFCCC host.

Visa barriers to Global South participation in climate meetings are neither new nor unique to Germany. As far back as 2008, IIED raised concerns about the exclusion of delegates from least developed countries from UN climate negotiations in Europe due to visa delays. For the Bonn sessions SB60 in 2024, 223 delegates from Africa and Asia were documented to experience difficulties of getting visas in time or at all: 25 were denied outright, 167 applications were left unprocessed and 37 receiving visas delayed – leaving countries including Burundi, Cameroon, Egypt, Morocco, and Rwanda without a single representative in the opening days. In 2025, reported cases had risen to 298. The recurring reasons include refused appointments, requirements to apply in distant third countries, and denials citing alleged doubts about return intentions. Frustration about this has been voiced frequently, by delegates in the closing plenary of the Bonn sessions or, in a less diplomatic tone by the civil society network CAN, calling on Germany to “end its visa war on African Delegates”. 

Behind these figures are people with formal accreditation, a concrete work plan, and often full funding, who are still unable to attend. As a young delegate from Asia described: "Definitely visa challenges are one of the biggest barriers I have. Coming from the Global South, we have to spend like two to three months just running to the embassy for a visa, requesting it, appealing again and again. Many of my colleagues didn't get the visa, even they had full funding, even a complete plan on how we were going to work together — they were not able to be here." This is not an individual misfortune. It is a structural barrier that excludes precisely those voices, negotiators from the least developed countries, young activists, and frontline community representatives, whose presence is critical to the legitimacy of the multilateral climate process.

The argument that visa barriers are administratively unavoidable does not hold. Host countries of recent COPs in the UAE, Azerbaijan, and Brazil all introduced dedicated fast-track procedures for accredited UNFCCC participants. Crucially, so have Schengen member states. Article 25(1) of the Schengen Visa Code explicitly permits member states to issue visas where "international obligations" require it. For COP21 in Paris, France used this provision to grant accredited participants short-stay visas upon presenting their accreditation letter alone, exempt from standard supporting documents. For COP25, within barely four weeks of notice, Spain issued centralised instructions to all 182 of its consulates worldwide to guarantee a speedy procedure and negotiated agreements with other Schengen states for countries without Spanish representation.

Before the 2026 SB64, over 80 signatories, ranging from Amnesty International to the Zimbabwe People's Land Rights Movement, reminded Germany as home to the Bonn sessions in an open letter that the credibility of multilateral processes rests on who is in the room. Inclusive multilateralism is not only a matter of what is negotiated — it is a matter of who gets to negotiate. Germany, as host of the UNFCCC Secretariat, UNDP and UN Women and as an aspiring UN Security Council member, carries a particular responsibility to ensure that its consulates do not become the first barrier to legitimate global governance - and to the trust of the partners it depends on. The solutions exist. The precedents exist. What seems to be missing is the political will to act.

Over the last decades, the share of world population living in extreme poverty has been declining, except in the period just after the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the absolute number of people in poverty has slightly increased and is expected to rise even more after 2030. This is due to various factors, including the increased number of conflicts and extreme weather events and the stagnation of economies. At the same time, inequality and the number of people suffering from hunger remain high at the global level and are even increasing in many countries.

These worrisome predictions call for renewed efforts in the fight against poverty, hunger and inequality. It is therefore very welcome that Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation (BMZ) has maintained the eradication of poverty, hunger and inequality as the first of four goals in its recent reform plan. It is less clear, though, what instruments will be used to achieve this goal. This will be impossible without social protection, which includes contributory schemes like social insurance and non-contributory programmes like cash transfers or cash-for-work. The experience of countries around the world shows that social protection systems are crucial for combating poverty, hunger and inequality. It is no coincidence that social protection is the first policy area mentioned in the first Sustainable Development Goal, which deals with poverty eradication. BMZ, however, plans to fade out its commitment to social protection in most partner countries.

Scholars from Tulane University provide evidence that most low- and middle-income countries have reduced poverty and inequality primarily through non-contributory social protection, health and education programmes. This result has previously been detected also in high income countries. Even China could not have achieved its remarkable poverty reduction without combining a major economic transformation with redistributive policies, such as land reform and social protection schemes targeting the poor. World Bank reports indicate that the world will not be able to reduce the share of people living in extreme poverty to under 3% over the next 20 years if countries do not significantly intensify income redistribution by raising taxes and strengthening social protection.

Just promoting economic growth will not solve the problem, as this year’s Report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights emphasises. Especially when accompanied by high levels of inequality and driven by resource extraction or capital-intensive modes of production, growth has only limited effects on poverty. Such patterns are particularly widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example in Nigeria and South Africa.

The observation holds even more for multidimensional poverty, which has declined much less than income poverty during the last decades, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, economic growth has hardly any effect on non-monetary dimensions of poverty in low- and middle-income countries.

In order to make a lasting contribution to the fight against poverty and hunger, economic growth should be labour-intensive and complemented – or even preceded – by investments in social protection, education and health. Especially non-contributory social protection programmes such as cash transfers are essential to address pockets of poverty, i.e. to reach out to those who do not benefit from economic growth. These pockets include people living in remote areas, people with limited education and training, people with health impairments or disability, and older adults. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, these social protection schemes do not discourage people from working.

German development cooperation should therefore support crisis-affected countries, but also other low-income countries, in establishing and expanding reliable and well-targeted non-contributory social protection schemes and not end its commitment to social protection in large parts of the world. Other instruments, like social insurance, are also useful but do not help low-income people who cannot afford to pay their social contributions, especially if they make their living from informal, unstable employment.

Investing in social protection does not necessarily mean that donors like Germany should pay the cash transfers themselves. Through technical cooperation, they could support partner countries build up stable social protection systems, ideally incorporated in national constitutions or other legislative frameworks. People must know what kinds of benefits they are entitled to, and when. Only if they can rely on the long-term existence of social protection schemes, they can invest in human capital and in more remunerative economic activities, which could substantially improve their wellbeing. This is a prerequisite for the full unfolding of social protection's potential to promote social, economic and political development in all parts of the world.

On World Oceans Day 2026, June 8, the ocean sits at the centre of a troubling paradox. After two decades of negotiations, the entry into force of the High Seas Treaty or the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) on 17 January, marked a rare achievement in multilateral cooperation. BBNJ gives new political weight to biodiversity protection and benefit-sharing beyond national jurisdiction. And yet, archaic narratives continue to dominate oceans: extraction, military security, and territorial control.

What does Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland have to do with the Strait of Hormuz? Very little, at first glance. One is often conjured as an Arctic “frontier” of melting ice, mineral wealth, Indigenous sovereignty, and great-power rivalry. The other has returned, singularly, as a maritime “chokepoint”, a narrow corridor where energy supplies, food security, shipping, and military threats converge. Yet, both are being drawn into the same grammar of resource and strategic access.

To frame these developments only as geopolitics misses the point. We are seeing a wider reordering of ocean space as infrastructure and political leverage. In Kalaallit Nunaat, talk of Arctic opportunity can push Indigenous self-determination and planetary environmental considerations to the margins. In Hormuz, disruption in a narrow strait exacerbates already precarious working conditions for seafarers and has global repercussions, hitting household economies within and far beyond the Gulf. Just as multilateral ocean cooperation gains traction, ocean politics is reverting to familiar habits of militarisation, route control, and hunger for resources, often cloaked in state strategic anxiety.

Ocean Cooperation: Torn between Corridor- and Planetary Thinking

Ocean governance has long imagined the high seas as open space, caught between free movement and enclosure. But this freedom was never universal. Across the Indian Ocean for example, passages linking the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea were shaped by trade, diplomacy, unfree labour, pilgrimage, and monsoonal knowledge, but also by taxation and negotiated access. “Corridor thinking” has older maritime roots: movement has always rested on unequal relations of control.

Melting sea ice has spurred the imaginary of the Arctic as a "region of riches", providing access to rare earths, oil, gas, and shorter sea routes. This “resource optimism” and geostrategic thinking disregard national and international rules, laws, and voluntary agreements, keeping alive the view of the Arctic as an “empty white space” to be conquered. The Arctic is still treated as an environmental frontier, overlooking its four million inhabitants and its place within global social and environmental transformations. 

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is the legal framework for marine and maritime activities, and can be seen as an unusually expansive form of planetary thinking from the 1990s. It made the ocean governable as a shared space of rights and responsibilities. Yet, the same architecture also made certain divisions appear self-evident, separating surface from depth, seabed from water column, shipping lanes from fishing grounds, and cable routes from military zones. Today, those divisions are stretched by maritime identities, regional alliances, Indigenous claims, and older oceanic histories. Chile’s constitutional debate around maritorio sees the sea as living territory. Indigenous claims of the Arctic as “homeland” and renewed attention to Afro-Asian maritime histories remind us that ocean politics has never belonged only to conventional security and defence planners. Beyond the UN Ocean Decade, new regional ocean politics is being shaped by heritage, memory, and the asymmetric dependencies that bind seemingly diverse maritime spaces.

There is a double standard: The sea is kept open for capital, energy, minerals, data, and naval mobility, but closed or policed for others. Shipping lanes and energy corridors are secured, while migrant routes are criminalised and Indigenous waters and island ecologies are made disposable. Ocean cooperation must therefore ask not only who is enabled to move and who is not, but also at what cost existing systems are kept afloat. It calls for confronting the politics of passage – not only as movement across water, but as labour and the relations that sustain coastal and oceanic life.

Quo Vadis Global Ocean Cooperation?

Today, connected land-sea future-making faces a crisis of imagination and must confront geopolitics. There is an urgency to challenge corridor- and frontier-thinking and to advance planetary perspectives. As the potential location of the BBNJ secretariat in China reveals, BBNJ offers a chance to renew global cooperation by breaking new grounds. In addition to investments in critical ocean knowledge as envisioned by the UN Ocean Decade, we call for bolder political leadership recognising that maritime dynamics are not peripheral to energy security, food systems, climate action, or household survival. With the established multilateral order put into question, this moment invites us to re-imagine global ocean cooperation and re-design political structures by acknowledging interdependencies between people, marine life, infrastructures, markets, and living environments.

Professor Andy Sumner is a professor of International Development at King’s College London and President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.