A call to cooperate

David Dodwell says countries must match rhetoric with action to solve urgent problems such as climate change and the regulation of artificial intelligence Two egrets spread their wings and take flight at the Tai Po Market Egretry. Photo: Jelly Tse

It does not take US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to China to remind us that of all the “polycrisis” challenges the world faces, the single most troubling is the collapse in our willingness to cooperate. Her call for more cooperation in particular between the US and China is of course very welcome. But it would be more welcomed if and when the lecture-like rhetoric is matched by concrete action.

None of the key challenges facing us – recovering from the pandemic, containing inflation, ending the dreadful wars in Ukraine and Gaza, keeping artificial intelligence (AI) under control or fending off catastrophic climate change – will be effectively addressed without a radical retreat from xenophobiadriven protectionism, cliquish unilateralism, and the nationalist parish-pump rhetoric that dominates this year’s “democratic” elections.

The safety of our futures relies much more heavily on extensive cross-border collaboration than most of our politicians recognise – not just in the large, lumbering multinational institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations but in dozens of unglamorous, seldom-noticed international organisations.

At our peril, many of these international talk-shops have been put in jeopardy while most of our political leaders have neither noticed nor cared, instead preferring to construct comfortable echo-chambers that are more easily controlled and managed.

We draw comfort from small successes, even in remote and seldom-considered areas. Take the Arctic, for example. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, meetings of the Arctic Council shuddered to a halt. Russia happened to be the council’s chair at the time and cooperation was deemed unconscionable.

But with 65 per cent of Russian territory sitting on permafrost, climate change across Arctic Russia is of critical importance to us all. Russia is also by far the most ambitious user of the Arctic Ocean, including its mineral resources and the sea routes that are opening up as sea ice melts.

So all credit to Norway, the current Arctic Council chair, for winning an agreement to resume meetings for the first time in two years – even if those meetings will for the time being remain virtual. Over the past two years of inaction, collaboration on Arctic research has been put in severe jeopardy, as well as much work focused on tracking climate change.

It is estimated that more than a quarter of the 28 trillion tonnes of sea ice that has melted since 1994 has come from the Arctic, a trend that contributes to sea-level rise worldwide, threatens to alter ocean currents and even affects global timekeeping.

Efforts to accurately anticipate significant climatic changes and mitigate their impacts remain hopelessly compromised while we refuse to cooperate.

Collaboration has also been compromised on the thaw of permafrost and the climate impact of wildfires in the Arctic.

Since temperatures in the Arctic are rising at least three times – and perhaps four times – faster than the global average, this collapse in cooperation has created challenges worldwide.

It has inflamed the anxieties of those tasked to monitor and manage climate change. Gavin Schmidt at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York commented in the journal Nature last month that, “no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023”.

The overshoot of 0.2 degrees Celsius per month last year was “a huge margin at the planetary scale [and] if the anomaly does not stabilise by August … the world will be in uncharted territory”.

Echoing Schmidt’s anxieties, Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, noted last month that recent record temperatures have thrust the world into “unknown territory”. Clearly, if there has ever been an imperative for Yellen and her Chinese counterparts to put aside self-interested differences and intensify cooperation, it must be now.

Beyond the shared challenge of climate change, other small cooperative successes can be celebrated. Credit should go to the Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA), which met last month for continuing talks regarding regulations of deep-ocean mining of potato-sized “polymetallic nodules” that litter the seabed in their millions.

The ISA sits between mining companies salivating over a potential deep-sea bonanza and environmental groups anxious to remind the organisation of its statutory obligations to ensure the world’s international waters remain “the common heritage of humankind”.

Whatever pressures arise from the collapse of different nations’ willingness to cooperate and compromise, organisations like the ISA continue to battle on, as do organisations like the Arctic Council and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, tasked to protect our “common heritage” no matter how aggressively governments pursue their own national interests.

If Yellen is truly interested to put her government’s money where her mouth is, she would not only seek cooperation on climate change but also on properly regulating AI. Yellen has discussed debt relief during her visit but it is time to actually give a helping hand to the many developing economies mired in debt and heavy debt-service obligations.

She would be talking about reconstruction of the World Trade Organization’s mechanism for settling international trade disputes, which was wantonly dismantled by the Trump administration. She may also want to talk about tackling the cynical misuse of permanent members’ veto powers at the United Nations. A simple willingness to listen rather than just lecture would be a good start.