What can attending negotiations on biodiversity, land and climate tell us about the changing politics of global environmental governance? Reflections from Nairobi, Ulaanbaatar, Beijing and Shanghai.
This summer took me across three very different spaces of global environmental governance. I started in Nairobi, attending the meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for the first time after almost eight years of following the UN climate negotiations. From there, I travelled to Ulaanbaatar for the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), before continuing to Beijing and Shanghai for conversations with researchers and practitioners about China’s role in global environmental governance. Moving between these settings offered an unusual opportunity to compare not only three Rio Conventions, but also three very different political and institutional contexts.
What struck me most was how much these regimes have in common – and how different they nevertheless feel.
A different kind of environmental politics
My first stop, Nairobi, in late July and early August made the similarities and differences between the environmental regimes particularly clear. The meetings of the CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-28) and Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-7) covered an extraordinary range of issues. Negotiators were reviewing progress towards the 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), while simultaneously addressing questions around finance, digital sequence information, biosafety, genetic resources and benefit-sharing.
After years researching and observing the climate regime, biodiversity governance initially appeared both more complex and less global. This may partly be a matter of perspective – climate negotiations are hardly simple, as anyone following the debates around more than 100 adaptation indicators will appreciate. Biodiversity governance, for its part, brings together a particularly broad range of sectors, interests and forms of knowledge. Its political geography is also different. Agriculture and land use are much more central in the biodiversity debates than fossil fuels, making countries such as Brazil and Argentina particularly influential. And, unlike the UNFCCC, the CBD does not have straightforward equivalents to some of the formal negotiating coalitions that have become so important in climate diplomacy, such as the Like-Minded Developing Countries or the Environmental Integrity Group.
The atmosphere was different too. Compared with the climate negotiations I have followed since 2017, Nairobi felt noticeably less tense. There was laughter, energisers and even chocolate being passed around negotiating rooms – small details, perhaps, but ones that shape the experience of diplomacy. Civil society also appeared to have more space to contribute directly to negotiations: organisations can propose text where a Party is willing to sponsor it, something I learned is relatively standard practice in the CBD.
These differences point to a question at the heart of my research: how do institutional rules and negotiating cultures shape whose knowledge and political claims can enter global environmental governance?
Comparing the Global Reviews
The CBD negotiations were particularly relevant to my research because the Convention is preparing its first Global Review of collective progress in implementing the biodiversity framework. This process offers a fascinating comparison with the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement.
One early difference concerns the potential political significance of the respective processes. The first Global Stocktake culminated at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 with the landmark call for a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. Whatever its limitations, this became a defining political moment for the climate regime. From what I observed in Nairobi, I would be surprised if the first CBD Global Review produces an equivalent political breakthrough at COP17 in Armenia. The discussions so far have been considerably more technical, focused primarily on assessing progress across the targets of the biodiversity regime.
The role of science in the Global Review also appears different. A central question in my research on the GST is how the process constructs and mobilises the “best available science”, particularly through the work of the IPCC. I therefore expected the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to play a similarly central role in the CBD’s Global Review. Instead, I was struck by the importance of national reports from Parties in constructing its evidence base. This does not necessarily make the process less science-based. Rather, it suggests a different epistemic architecture: different ways of assembling evidence, assigning authority to knowledge and translating it into collective political assessment.
When geopolitics enters the negotiating room
From Nairobi, I travelled to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for UNCCD COP17, the land and anti-desertification COP, taking place in Mid-August. Here, the contrast was less about the substantive agenda than about the increasingly difficult geopolitical environment in which environmental negotiations are taking place.
The United States blocked discussion of several agenda items at the beginning of the COP, including issues concerning gender, civil society participation and synergies between the three Rio Conventions. The US had not joined the CBD and had announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, providing a broader context of reduced US engagement in multilateral environmental governance. Throughout the two weeks, US interventions and objections repeatedly complicated progress on substantive issues, from land degradation and pastoralism to drought resilience and food security.
The consequences were particularly tangible for civil society. The blocked agenda item would have provided space to discuss civil society participation in UNCCD negotiations – an issue of obvious importance in a regime dealing with communities, livelihoods and ecosystems. Women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, farmers and pastoralists are not peripheral stakeholders in these debates; their knowledge and experiences are central to the issues being negotiated. For my own research, there was also a practical consequence: I had planned to conduct participant observation of the negotiations, but the restrictions in observing negotiations made this impossible.
Happening alongside the official negotiations, discussions on synergies between the Rio Conventions took place at the land-COP in Ulaanbataar. Climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation are deeply interconnected, yet their governance remains institutionally fragmented across the UNFCCC, CBD and UNCCD. There was considerable momentum for greater cooperation in Ulaanbaatar, including through high-level side events and repeated calls
from Parties. The challenge is to turn this recognition into political and institutional arrangements rather than leaving synergies as a matter of voluntary coordination.
What happened in Mongolia was therefore about more than the individual agenda items that were blocked. The politics of multilateralism are also politics over the rules governing participation, agenda-setting and decision-making. These rules determine who can enter the negotiating room, whose voices can be heard and which issues can be brought to the table.
From Ulaanbaatar to Beijing
Subsequently, I travelled from Mongolia to China in 33 hours by train, arriving in Beijing at a moment when the geopolitical dimension of these observations became particularly apparent. Conversations with several partners of IDOS in Beijing and Shanghai centred on a question that is becoming increasingly difficult for environmental governance scholars to avoid: what happens when one major power retreats from multilateralism and another becomes more active?
US disengagement is creating financial and institutional pressures for international environmental governance. Against this backdrop, China has stepped in to address funding shortfalls affecting international environmental institutions and is bidding to host the new BBNJ Secretariat. These signals point towards an increasing willingness to invest political and material resources in the multilateral system.
At the same time, travelling through China made the scale of its domestic green transition apparent. From the high-speed train, I watched wind and solar installations stretch across the landscape, while electric vehicles were simply part of everyday life. None of this resolves the complex questions surrounding China’s climate and environmental politics, but it does make it difficult to understand China’s role through geopolitics alone.
The possibility of China hosting climate COP33 – the second Global Stocktake COP – in 2028 can be seen as an opportunity for assuming greater responsibility as US engagement declines. Others were sceptical that China is ready to take on such a role, or should fill the vacuum, pointing at the EU to step forward.
My own takeaway is about the need for much deeper China–EU dialogue on multilateral environmental governance. Conversations were considerably more nuanced than many of the narratives we encounter from a distance. There are profound political differences and competing interests between Europe and China, but also a shared stake in whether institutions such as the Rio Conventions remain capable of addressing problems that no country can solve alone.
Lessons for global environmental governance
Taken together, the experiences in Nairobi, Ulaanbaatar, Beijing and Shanghai reinforced the value of looking across environmental regimes rather than studying the climate regime in isolation. The CBD, UNCCD and UNFCCC share their origins in Rio 1992 and many of their fundamental political divisions, but they have developed distinct negotiating cultures, forms of participation, knowledge systems and configurations of power. At the same time, the three regimes increasingly confront the same broader challenge: how to sustain and adapt multilateral cooperation in a changing geopolitical environment.
Looking across these cases makes clear that the future of global environmental governance will not be determined by negotiations over substantive issues alone. It will also depend on who participates, whose knowledge is considered authoritative, who has the power to block decisions, and increasingly, which states are willing to invest political and material resources in maintaining multilateral institutions. The interconnectedness of climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation makes cooperation across regimes ever more necessary, even as governance remains institutionally fragmented and geopolitical tensions increase. These dynamics make questions of knowledge, power, participation and justice central to understanding how global environmental governance works – and how it may evolve.
