Bold climate cooperation can emerge from the second week of the SB62 round of negotiations in Bonn… if countries choose to favor action, investment, and transformation, over further debate and delay.

Today, we emerge from the midway point into week 2 of the current round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations. However esoteric or frustrating that process might seem, depending how engaged you are with it, there are important signals emerging about where we stand in our collective venture into the future: 

• Countries cannot agree on the definition of vital collective goals like successful adaptation, safety, and resilience, human rights, or even what the word finance means in policy and practice. 
• Sharing of knowledge is understood to have immense, and maybe existential value, but how it should be done, and whether it should happen at all, are still in dispute. A surprising number of countries consider this to be a question of “national sovereignty”, which of course will not survive a world of unchecked climate disruption. 
• There are important calls, from a diverse range of countries, for better integration of stakeholder insights into policy-making, more value-building consideration of ocean health and the resilience of ecosystems, and for tools and guidance to foster mainstream climate banking. 
• Even as a very delicate, decades-long process of careful negotiated cooperation moves slowly along, bombs are falling and a major conflagration involving tens of millions of people, is deepening. 

Geopolitics will, as it has done many times before, obstruct progress toward a safe and sustainable future. So, increasingly, we see acknowledgement—sometimes explicit, but often unspoken—that we live at a time of immense peril, in which: 

• Decisions made in Washington might cost tens of millions of lives, an underreported fact that will have ripple effects for centuries;
• A refusal of countries large and small to commit to cooperative fossil fuel disarmament could permanently alter atmospheric and geophysical conditions on our planet; 
• The cost of the wrong choices will be measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars this century alone, if we are still able to measure such things in such a way 75 years from now;
• Food systems are gravely at risk, with some projections showing the U.S. and other major food-growing regions producing half or less than half as much food, if climate disruption and nature loss are not stopped;
• It is widely reported that “we are closer to nuclear war than at any point in history”, at this very moment;
• And, trust in leaders and institutions is breaking down, such that it would almost seem a surprise if we get out of this mess at all.

Trust is breaking down, as access to opportunity, information, and redress, all appear to be suffering grave challenges. Income inequality is spiraling. Even in places where large numbers of people are seeing a surge in incomes, the overall gap in economic security is still widening. That makes it harder to emerge from hardship, whether for households, cities, regions, or whole countries. 

Climate disruption is causing scarcity to infiltrate more lives in more places, even when that doesn’t appear to be the immediate cause of scarcity or unrest. Automated systems are interfering with our access to reliable information and evidence, which weakens are personal and political sovereignty and leads to underinformed, risky decisions by leaders, which have real human costs.

Over the weekend, an unprecedented major storm on Lake Tahoe, at altitudes where turbulent seas and cyclonic storms are not a customary threat, killed at least six people. This kind of shock event is an effect of global climate disruption, and a sign that adaptation and resilience measures are 1) fatefully tied to the question of how effectively we slow and stop climate pollution, and 2) likely to involve deeply collaborative creative problem-solving. 

Mountain ecosystems are at risk from glacier depletion, increased heat and aridity, and also more frequent landslides, fires, and storms. As we move into week 2 of the SB62 negotiations, we need to zero in teleconnections—dynamics working at distance through planetary systems—and what they mean for specific opportunities for international cooperation to achieve mutual gains and shared sustainable security and prosperity. 

We point to the following as areas where significant progress can be made to support such cooperation: 

• Adaptation indicators, plans, insight-sharing, and actions; 
• Guidance and incentives for banking and finance, with innovative solutions for affordable insurance and disaster response;
• Leveraging food systems as a connective fabric of everyday economics that can benefit people and nature;
• Valuing conservation as an achievement that builds value for everyone;
• Creative engagement strategies that allow for localized cooperative economic development in line with Paris goals;
• Non-market cooperation in line with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.

There is powerful historical momentum for continuing to go slow, project active climate transformation to start years from now, and to focus primarily on what choices one’s own country might prefer in the short term. This leads to excess caution, a proliferation of “strategic ambiguity”, and a sense that national leaders will not secure what they want or abide strictly by outcomes.

The COP30 will make crucial decisions, which may resonate for centuries to come, about the health of critical ecosystems and the prospects for security and wellbeing for people in all regions. The complicated technical progress everyone is working for, and which requires time and consideration, is needed, but so is the political will to shift incentives and drive transformation.

We urge negotiators, experts, lawmakers in capitals around the world, and heads of government, to consider that eventually, the cascade of transformational interventions must begin, or intolerable costs will fall on all countries. Even those industries that have most contributed to climate disruption will not experience the geophysical safety and stability they hope for, if climate crisis response does not become an everyday driver of technical and economic progress.