First the bad news: the planet is in peril. On June 6, an international team of scientists published a study in the journal Nature warning that because of human activity, the planet is reaching a potentially catastrophic tipping point. Humans have already radically altered 43% of the earth's surface from its natural state, far greater than the smaller changes that helped trigger the last great planetary shift during the ice ages 11,000 years ago. If development keeps up at the current pace, humans will have transformed half the planet by 2025. After that, there may be no going back.
Now here's the really bad news: we seem to be completely incapable of doing anything about it. On June 20, thousands of delegates from around the world will convene in Rio de Janeiro for what's officially called the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development. It's better known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit, marking 20 years since the original Earth Summit, also held in Rio, where more than 100 world leaders, including then U.S. President George H.W. Bush, met to address global environmental threats. The challenges were grim, but there was hope that a post — Cold War world could come together to fix them. "We must leave this earth in better condition than we found it," Bush said in Rio that year. "Our village is truly global."
But 20 years on, the earth is in even worse condition, and the unmanageably large "global village" is the reason why. Take climate change. In 1992, the vast majority of carbon emissions came from developed nations like the U.S., Japan, Germany and the former Soviet Union. While they had their political and economic differences, those countries had the sort of common ground that provided a framework for meaningful diplomacy. Whether it was earlier environmental pacts like the Montreal Protocol, which reduced ozone-depleting substances, or global arms control or trade, back then a relatively small club of nations could sit down together and hash out a deal. Global cooperation wasn't easy, but it was possible — and when push came to shove, the U.S., as the sole superpower, could always provide an extra nudge.
So it was initially with climate change: the first Rio summit produced the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that committed the nations of the world to fight global warming and set in motion international climate diplomacy. But in the years since, nearly all the increase in global carbon emissions has come from large developing nations like China and India — nations with very different priorities. If it was hard enough to tackle a global problem like climate change when just a few rich nations needed to come to an agreement, it became nearly impossible when China, India and other developing nations had a seat at the table. Suddenly there were too many voices with too many diverging interests. The noise made meaningful consensus impossible.
It's no surprise, then, that in the years since Rio, the international community has made little progress in restraining global carbon emissions. Even the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was marred by the fact that the U.S. refused to ratify it — and that was because China and other major developing nations refused to take on their own carbon cuts. Efforts to forge a truly global deal imploded at the 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when it became clear that 191 countries would never agree on how to divide responsibility for fighting global warming. The international climate process has ground to a halt, even as the planet keeps warming up, with 2012 on track to be the hottest year on record.
But it's not just environmental threats that the international community seemingly lacks the will to solve. From the international financial crisis to the euro meltdown to the paralysis over Syria, the world is experiencing a deficit in global cooperation and leadership at the very moment that countries need to come together. We're stuck in what Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer calls the G-Zero World, one where no single nation or coalition of nations — in the declining West or the rising East — is strong enough to lead. The result is inaction, inertia and failure.
The Rio+20 summit won't get the attention its predecessor earned, in part because fear of a pending global economic catastrophe has rather crowded out all the other looming disasters. But while little of substance will come out of Rio, that doesn't mean the threat to the planet has gone away. Far from it. We may be utterly divided on how to fight climate change, but we'll suffer the consequences together.