Since the Paris Agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has sped up the transition to renewable energy and fundraising for climate resilience.

The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) has become a ritual of global mobilization -- world leaders, diplomats, civil society, and media converging to push carbon reduction to the forefront of world politics. Industries around green power and electric transport have exploded, from solar panels and turbines to batteries and critical minerals, reshaping trade deals and the geopolitics of superpowers. Ambitious projects are multiplying, like Europe's offshore wind farms in the North and Baltic Seas, China's vast Midong Solar Park in Xinjiang, and the European Space Agency's SOLARIS project to beam solar power from orbit. Climate NGOs, think tanks, awareness campaigns, are consuming funds and plat

However, results fall far behind the target. The Paris Agreement's nationally determined contributions (NDCs) reveal the gap: unevenly applied and misaligned with the aim to limit global warming to "well below" 2°C by the end of the century and to "pursue efforts" to keep warming within the safer limit of 1.5°C.

The UNFCCC's global scope often overlooks the uneven realities of climate impacts and responses, shaped by distinct worldviews, governance, and economies. Internally, the UNFCCC's consensus rule cripples urgent decisions, as seen in the Plastic Treaty stalemate in Geneva. Externally, superpower rivalries and oil-exporting states exploit bureaucratic slowness to block swift change. The collective will of the globe to redirect finance, policy, and resources toward decisive action remains insufficient, particularly when the president of the most influential and founding member state of the UN calls climate change a "con job." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has recently released an alarming report that, due to anthropogenic carbon emissions, wildfires, and reduced CO₂ absorption by "sinks" such as land ecosystems and the oceans, the atmospheric carbon concentration has tripled since the 1960s. From 2023 to 2024, the global average concentration of CO₂ surged by 3.5 ppm -- the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957.

Meanwhile, by 2025, the hydrothermal behavior of Earth now signals an aggressive response to centuries of humans' relentless pursuit of urban expansion, high-speed mobility, and luxurious consumption. Humanity no longer needs advocacy campaigns, statistical analyses of oceanic jet streams, or technical forecasts of hydrology maps to grasp the truth: rains are no longer romantic; winds are no longer predictable; water is no longer sufficient; and the sun is no longer benevolent. The catastrophic implications of climate change have become part of daily human experience. Across both the Global South and North, people suffer and die in weather extremes in the USA, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Communities face unbearable intensities of flash floods, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, and water scarcity -- so much so that the term record-breaking has lost its novelty.

At this point, only a transformational shift in concept and strategy can meet the urgency -- one that adds another operational layer to support the global goals. This requires precision with a sense of urgency, a sort of diplomatic regionalism from the ground up, with shared geographical features placed at the center of international architecture. High-priority clusters of states could unite around these transboundary climatic systems -- mountain ranges, forests, river basins, glacial ice sheets, and coastlines -- with legal cover under the UN so that treaties and obligations carry enforceable weight. Equipped with local data, trained personnel, and adaptive methods, these regional institutions could implement restoration projects, manage resources equitably, and act with urgency where global bureaucracy cannot.

These shared ecosystems are engines of life for their regions. They sustain agriculture, livestock, and freshwater and shape landscapes and weather. However, in most cases, their ecological balance has been destroyed by global warming and continuous human neglect. Water-extensive practices -- large-scale corporate farming, rising populations, high-carbon diets, and cooling data centers for the escalating demand for generative AI products -- have already begun to overstretch the Earth's freshwater capacity. In March 2023, the Global Commission on the Economics of Water warned that global freshwater demand may exceed supply by 40% by 2030. No single nation can confront these pressures alone. The shared ecosystems of these geographical features are fueling interstate and intrastate conflicts globally. Humanity faces two stark choices: build models of cooperation to protect the transboundary ecosystems that are depositories of freshwater or stumble into water wars in addition to enduring repeated "mini climate doomsdays."

Practical examples of transboundary ecosystem cooperation include a Himalayan framework uniting China, India, and Pakistan over the preservation and restoration of the rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers and associated rivers like the Indus and Brahmaputra; a Tigris-Euphrates union for Turkey, Syria, and Iraq; Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan forming a Union of the River Nile; Central Asian collaboration over the Fergana Valley and the Syr Darya Basin involving Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan; a Caucasus Mountains arrangement linking Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and rivers such as the Kura and Aras; a European Alps framework connecting France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Slovenia, and rivers such as the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube; an Amazon Biome pact across Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and others to jointly protect the largest remaining tropical rainforest in the world, housing at least 10% of the world's known biodiversity with the biggest water discharge into the oceans; and strengthened North American coordination over the Rio Grande and Colorado between the U.S. and Mexico.

Such bodies could do more than manage rivers. They could synchronize emergency responses, pool scientific knowledge, allocate regional funds, integrate Indigenous practices, pilot cross-border technologies, and launch cultural campaigns in local languages to encourage active roles in protecting and restoring the origins of rivers, shared glaciers, cross-border jungles, rainforests, and coastal ecosystems. Rooted in local realities but linked to global goals, these unions would bring precision, urgency, and cultural legitimacy to climate action.

This approach also reframes the very meaning of internationalism. The current system, shaped by the philosophical residue of two world wars and reinforced by Eurocentric classifications like "Middle East" or "South Asia," bears little relation to the climatic and geographical realities of different regions. Climate breakdown now demands a different foundation -- one not based on nations' economic and strategic competitions but on shared survival and an integrated sense of being with nature as the top priority of human political and intellectual discourse.

The climate struggle is not only technical but civilizational. Our glaciers, rivers, and forests are no longer passive backdrops to politics; they have become the stage itself. Centuries of human epistemological disconnect from nature -- indoctrinated through philosophies and religions that cast the human species as special, the principal heirs of heaven on Earth -- have entrenched a self-congratulatory mindset in which everything else is relegated to object status, to be exploited and used. All these factors make it imperative to bring a transformational shift in the very concept and strategy of climate action. If humanity cannot summon the collective will to protect these ecosystems, they will become triggers of conflict and collapse. But if we can turn these frontiers of tension into frontiers of cooperation, they may yet anchor a new kind of peace -- measured not merely in treaties but in the survival of the ecosystems that make life possible for generations to come. (Continued...)

-- The author is a regular columnist and commentator on global affairs, serving on the panels of the UNFCCC and ICAN.