COPs, from multilateral coordination to the geopolitical challenge

Born as one of the great symbols of environmental multilateralism, the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) bring together nearly 200 countries every year to negotiate common responses to some of the world's major global public challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, and soil degradation. In 2026, the three major international summits in these areas will coincide, but they will do so in a geopolitical context very different from the one in which they emerged at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the expansion of international cooperation has given way to a world marked by strategic competition, social and political fragmentation, and growing difficulties in reaching global agreements. 

Although their founding objectives remain unchanged—reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the climate COP, halting biodiversity loss in the biodiversity COP, and combating land degradation and desertification in the desertification COP—their commitments now have to be developed within a fragile balance between environmental urgency and increasing international tensions. Today, achieving consensus is more complex than it was three decades ago, negotiations move more slowly, and geopolitical tensions increasingly shape outcomes. 

 The first signs of exhaustion in the climate COP model emerged during the first decade of the 2000s, with the United States' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol—which required countries to reduce their emissions—the reluctance of some developed countries, and the rise of major emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil. The difficulty of maintaining a system in which only some countries assumed emission reduction obligations culminated in the failure of COP15 in Copenhagen, marking the transition towards a new model based on voluntary national contributions.

The evolution of the COPs has also led to the emergence of a parallel ecosystem of initiatives and collaborative spaces that go beyond formal negotiations between states. These include specific alliances such as the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) and the Global Methane Pledge, as well as regional pavilions aimed at highlighting specific priorities, such as the Med Pavilion of the Union for the Mediterranean.

National delegations have grown steadily over the years, alongside a broader presence of representatives from the business sector, cities, non-governmental organizations, development banks, financial institutions, philanthropic foundations, and social movements. This expansion is also reflected in attendance figures: while the first climate COP, held in Berlin in 1995, gathered around 4,000 participants, COP28 in Dubai brought together nearly 85,000 attendees, becoming the largest climate summit in history

The growth of the COPs reflects their transformation from forums focused almost exclusively on intergovernmental negotiations into major scenarios of climate and environmental governance where highly diverse interests, knowledge systems, and capacities for action converge. This opening has enabled the inclusion of new actors and accelerated certain initiatives, but it has also increased the complexity of the process and sparked debates about the influence of certain sectors—such as the fossil fuel industry—and the real ability of these summits to achieve ambitious agreements. 

Despite their limitations, the COPs remain one of the few spaces where almost all countries in the world sit together to negotiate common responses to global challenges. Their evolution mirrors the broader tensions within the international system: they are larger, more plural, and more difficult to manage than they were three decades ago, yet they remain an essential mechanism for coordinating collective action in response to the environmental crisis.

The next challenge will be strengthening the links among the three major environmental conventions—climate, biodiversity, and desertification. Although each addresses specific problems and maintains its own negotiation processes, their objectives are deeply interconnected: climate change affects ecosystems, biodiversity loss undermines adaptive capacity, and land degradation increases vulnerability to climate impacts.

For this reason, an increasing number of scientific voices are calling for stronger coordination among the three summits, as well as among the institutions behind them and the knowledge they generate, in order to advance a more integrated environmental response. Beyond the negotiations themselves, balancing environmental ambition with political feasibility will be one of the main tests of multilateralism in the years ahead.