Sudan is in the midst of a brutal war. More than 12 million people have been displaced, at least 150,000 people have died (likely many more), atrocities have been committed, and 21 million people — 45% of the population — are living with acute food insecurity.
And yet, Sudan managed to send a delegation to the latest UN climate negotiations in Brazil.
The United States did not.
This is one of the things I discussed with Lina Yassin on the latest episode of Threshold Conversations. Originally from Sudan, Lina is a researcher with the International Institute of Environment and Development. She’s been to nine COPs, helping to advise some of most climate-vulnerable countries in the global negotiations, including her own.
Given everything going on in Sudan right now, it would have been entirely understandable for the country to have opted out of the climate conference. Instead, Lina told me, the Sudanese delegation was “this strong force” at COP30, because “right now, farmers who survive bullets will not survive the fact that their harvest is failing…those who survive the war are not surviving climate change. And that means we can’t wait for peace to then come and say, oh, we need to help Sudan adapt to climate change. We need to do that while it’s happening. And to me and the Sudanese delegation, this has been the biggest motivation. We all came to Brazil with a huge grief that I can’t contain in words. But we kept working because we knew that we could save some lives. And I guess that’s the biggest motivation.”
As I learned first-hand when I attended COP26 in Glasgow, the annual UN climate conferences are confusing, frustrating, and imperfect in thousands of ways. They’re also incredibly important, especially to countries like Sudan, where climate impacts are already hitting hard: floods, droughts, extreme heat waves, and more. The UN conferences are “the only space where poor countries, developing countries, vulnerable communities have a say,” Lina told me.
This process of global collaboration on climate started 34 years ago — before Lina was born — in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the 1992 Earth Summit, more than 100 heads of state gathered to discuss water, biodiversity, forests, and the impact of fossil fuels on the atmosphere. They acknowledged that many of these environmental issues were too big and multi-faceted for existing structures of cooperation to handle; new systems were needed. As a result, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, was established.
The U.S. had a leadership role at the Earth Summit, and when George H.W. Bush submitted the UNFCCC to the Senate that same year, it was unanimously ratified. A few years later, the signatories began meeting at annual gatherings called COPs — conferences of the parties to the convention — and since then, every country in the world has signed the treaty.
But now, for the first time ever, one country has decided to withdraw from the UNFCCC. On January 7, President Trump signed a memo pulling the U.S. out of the treaty, as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN scientific body responsible for analyzing climate science.1
In normal times, this would be a huge story. The U.S. is attempting to walk away from an international treaty that we helped to create, that the Senate ratified, that has provided the bedrock for the whole process of global cooperation on climate.
But of course, these are not normal times. Federal agents are shooting down unarmed citizens. The president is claiming that he now runs one foreign country and plans to take over another. It’s understandably difficult to find the time or energy to think about the impact of this withdrawal from the UNFCCC.
But difficult is not the same thing as impossible. If Lina Yassin and other Sudanese people can continue to stay informed about and engaged in the global climate negotiations, surely I can — and must — as well.
It’s unclear what happens next. Trump’s attempt to withdraw the U.S. from the UNFCCC will likely be challenged in the courts, and this latest memo only formalizes what was already underway in practice: the administration has essentially ceased all funding and cooperation around climate.2 So in many ways, this was just a symbolic move.
But symbols matter. As flawed as it may be, the UNFCCC it is the only international forum where climate is the focus, and every country in the world is supposed to have a voice. It’s also a remarkably ambitious attempt to get all of humanity pulling in the same direction. We shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that it’s slow and unwieldy. And until we’ve created some alternative system of coordinating global action on one of the most important issues of our time, we shouldn’t give up.
The full list of 66 international organizations and treaties the U.S. is withdrawing from includes the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the UN Democracy Fund, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children.
This piece from Carbon Brief provides a great overview.