Suzanne Lazaroo
20 November 2025: As the world grapples with unseasonal heat and cold, and fire and floods of escalating frequency and severity, the effects of climate change are on increasingly overt display – University of Canberra Adjunct Professor Peter Bridgewater says that as one of our few mitigation strategies, environmental treaties need urgent reform to be effective.
Professor Bridgewater, from the Institute for Applied Ecology (IAE) at the University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, and co-author Associate Professor Rakhyun Kim from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, recently published in Nature.
In the article, they flag the August collapse of United Nations’ negotiations for a global plastics treaty as yet another warning that the way the world organises environmental cooperation is truly stuck – and propose a solution which could prove a necessary solvent.
“’Institutional paralysis’ is causing the problem – there are many meetings, at which much discussion takes place – but with little resulting real-world impact,” said Professor Bridgewater.
“The just-completed meeting of the Biodiversity Convention’s subsidiary science body – with many issues remaining unresolved – is a glaring example of how and why things get stuck. And in real time, we are witnessing yet again a climate COP bogging itself down.”
The co-authors say that many environmental treaties are not fit for purpose in the modern age, because they were designed for a different era, one with more manageable problems.
“Some project the image of being relevant and ever more important, which is vital for their survival, rather than acknowledging paralysis. Others increasingly turn to technological interventions that may only beget more problems,” said Associate Professor Kim.
“Many treaties have counter-intuitively worsened the very problem they were meant to solve,” said Professor Bridgewater.
“They are under-resourced – because resourcing isn’t increasing proportionally to the problems that need addressing and exist in isolation, rather than working together as a holistic system for one planet.”
Tech solutions may seem tempting, especially to plug resourcing gaps, but these aren’t the quick fix many hope – they can, in turn, give rise to more problems in the future if they’re not carefully considered and used.
The co-authors propose a solution however – create a standing, government-mandated, independent expert body to assess the health of the global environmental governance system as a whole. Rather than considering one treaty at a time, it would look at how the whole system works in practice.
“This body would regularly map what is effective and what is not, recommend concrete reforms to the UN Environment Assembly, and require countries and treaty bodies to ‘consider or comply’ with those recommendations. In other words, it would turn evidence into action,” said Associate Professor Kim.
Professor Bridgewater says that this would help treaties to move beyond the need for a blanket consensus, which often blocks progress.
“This approach will also enable coalitions of willing countries to act faster, reallocate resources to where they are most needed and could be most effective, and sort out and clarify mandates,” he said.
“It will also allow for outdated, ineffective treaties to be merged or retired, to make room for the ones that are actually relevant.
“Today’s institutions are being asked to do more with the same tools and the same rules that have, in the past, delivered uneven results. We need to apply a simple litmus test: is the whole treaty system safeguarding the planet’s life-support systems?”
Read the full article at