Ten years after the Paris agreement on climate change, which garnered government commitments to limit the average global temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius, renewed assertions of national autonomy are reshaping global environmental ambitions and priorities. In the face of mounting concerns over sluggish economic growth, societal polarization, and geopolitical conflict, countries’ environmental agendas are being recast by tighter state control over economies, industries, and technologies.
To some, these trends reflect a retreat from the optimism of 2015. But environmental policy ambitions are not receding. In fact, where climate change initiatives are perceived to present tangible opportunities for national growth, innovation, and resilience, they are now much more likely to succeed. Paradoxically, the world’s ability to meet shared goals—including keeping global warming well below two degrees and halting and reversing the loss of natural habitats—now depends on how effectively those goals are woven into national agendas for security, competitiveness, and industrial strength.
This reality presents international organizations and coalitions with both a challenge and an opportunity. They must ensure that autonomy remains connected rather than isolated by fostering dialogue and trust, facilitating access to finance and technology, and reinforcing global infrastructures for navigating complex tradeoffs with accountability, transparency, and coordination.
ECOSYSTEMS OF ACTION
The relationship between national interest and collective purpose has long shaped environmental action. Today’s reassertion of that autonomy is therefore less a rupture than a common thread.
The 1972 Stockholm Conference, which launched modern environmental governance, did so with a dual focus. It affirmed a universal right to a healthy environment, but it also reaffirmed the sovereign right of states to exploit their resources. The Montreal Protocol, signed 15 years later, was a rare case of international ambition and national interest overlapping almost entirely, leading to the virtual elimination of ozone-depleting substances. Subsequent initiatives moved the needle toward more centralized forms of action and were less successful. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 imposed legal obligations to reduce emissions, but only for developed countries. The gradual withdrawal of those states meant that over time, the protocol narrowed to cover only a small fraction of emissions. The attempt to replace it, in 2009, with a single, comprehensive global agreement proved even less successful.
The genius and fragility of the Paris agreement was its recognition that durable cooperation depends on autonomy. Nearly every country signed on to its framework, which requires that each state decide its own “nationally determined contribution” without an enforcement mechanism other than “stocktakes” every five years. The global emission curve has since flattened but remains above the trajectory required to meet the Paris targets.
The wider ecosystem of environmental action has also diversified. Cities, firms, investors, and regulators have become new centers of gravity, often shaping environmental outcomes through voluntary coordination and market influence. This shift has laid the foundation for a more flexible institutional architecture that amplifies countries’ actions through shared platforms, protocols, and standards.
This emerging order is less hierarchical than networked: a distributed web of actors and arrangements that coordinate through norms, incentives, and information flows rather than centralized authority. The cumulative effect is a complex but adaptive architecture in which effectiveness arises not from uniform design but from the interaction of diverse institutions that link autonomy and interdependence in practice.
NATIONAL ACTION, GLOBAL IMPACT
The key question now is whether parallel national efforts on competitiveness, security, and technology can deliver shared progress, especially when they contribute to and benefit from new forms of global cooperation and dialogue.
Climate resilience is where interdependence and national action meet most visibly. Every government must protect its citizens from heat, floods, and droughts, the causes of which lie beyond national borders. The test here is one of competence: translating shared planetary risks into effective local action, often by applying best practices and shared intelligence.
The Netherlands is often cited as the gold standard for resilience. Its Room for the River program is a model, redefining flood control as a reality to adapt to rather than defend against. But for most countries confronting intensifying climate impacts, adaptation is a new and improvised discipline that requires rapid learning and cross-border connections. Satellite-based forecasting and early warning systems, for example, give governments time to prepare that was unimaginable even recently. Financial mechanisms such as the Bridgetown Initiative, which aims to reform development financing, or the Global Shield Against Climate Risks, which, led by the G-7 and V-20, focuses on providing financial protection before catastrophe strikes, similarly enable more rapid disaster responses. In all these cases, national protection becomes far more effective when local systems are linked to shared data, finance, and expertise.
If adaptation tests a state’s capacity to protect, the green transition tests its capacity to prosper. Over the past few years, numerous governments have sought to make climate action an engine of industrial renewal, hoping that decarbonization would also deliver growth and jobs. The European Green Deal, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, and China’s vast investment in the “electric tech stack” all reflect this dual ambition, as do similar initiatives in India, Japan, and South Korea. The green economy is the world’s second-fastest growth sector, already exceeding $5 trillion in annual value and projected to grow by around six percent per year. More than half of global emissions can already be abated through cost-competitive solutions such as solar and wind power and passenger electric vehicles.
Assertions of national autonomy are reshaping global environmental ambitions and priorities.
Market forces have become powerful drivers of green growth, but public investment, regulation, and long-term policy signals remain essential to spur innovation and prevent backsliding. The next phase cannot be achieved in isolation. Modern industrial policy, even when framed in terms of economic autonomy, is highly interdependent: national performance relies on connections across supply chains, shared standards, and international investment flows. Green industries will scale at the pace that is required to meet emission targets only when capital and technology can move across borders. Whether governments can sustain this cooperative race to the top, rather than sliding into subsidy competition and resource nationalism, will determine whether green industrial policy becomes a foundation for shared prosperity or a new source of geopolitical friction.
Pollution is another area in which effective national action requires cooperation, since it stems from domestic choices and practices but crosses borders by air, land, and water and frequently harms communities far from where it originated. Its costs are immense, accounting for around one in six deaths globally and for welfare losses equivalent to about six percent of global GDP. The global distribution of these impacts is stark. In the United States, each dollar invested under the Clean Air Act has generated around $30 in health and productivity benefits. But about 90 percent of pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, most of which cannot hope to replicate such results in isolation.
The plastics crisis is particularly illustrative. Around 11 million tons of plastic enters the oceans each year, often washing up on shores far from where it was produced or used—a pattern compounded by the widespread export of plastic waste from developed to developing countries. This increasingly ubiquitous plastic pollution weakens biodiversity, threatens coastal economies, and jeopardizes human and animal health. The Global Plastic Action Partnership, hosted at the World Economic Forum, offers a model for tackling the problem by enabling the lateral diffusion of best practices across 25 National Plastic Action Partnerships, each of which develops its own country-specific road map that draws on shared data and experience from others. For example, design elements from one partnership on extended producer responsibility have been adopted by several others, demonstrating how practical tools can spread laterally.
Nature conservation and restoration offer a further illustration of how countries’ choices shape global outcomes. Forests, wetlands, and marine ecosystems are at once domestic assets and planetary life-support systems, meaning that policy shifts in a handful of ecosystem-rich states can have outsize effects on global carbon and biodiversity trajectories. This is also the arena in which formal treaty frameworks remain most active: nearly 200 countries have joined the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, committing to protect 30 percent of the earth’s land and sea by 2030, and the new Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement extends governance to the high seas. Conservation efforts are now also advancing through a widening array of more decentralized platforms and alliances. The global reforestation initiative 1t.org and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a rainforest protection financing mechanism officially launched at the UN Climate Conference in Belém, Brazil, in November, are both examples of how national autonomy can be reinforced through shared finance, standards, and collaborative stewardship.
MOVERS AND SHAPERS
Finance and technology are the two most decisive variables shaping whether and how national environmental action connects and scales across borders. A third is an evolving networked architecture of standards, platforms, and protocols that allows diverse actors to build trust and to support centralized and global mechanisms—or compensate for their absence.
For most governments, finance is the factor that most exposes the limits of policy autonomy on the environment. States can legislate and plan, but implementation depends on capital mobilization. The challenge is not insurmountable: mobilizing effective climate action would likely require total spending on the order of two to three percent of global GDP. But current financing falls far short of this level.
Ambition and fiscal capacity rarely align, and the gap between them will determine how far and how quickly the green transition will unfold. Indonesia’s Paris pledge illustrates this dependence: it promised an unconditional emission cut of 32 percent but with up to 43 percent of the required financing expected to come from international sources. For many developing economies, effective autonomy in climate policy depends as much on access to affordable capital as on domestic will.
Finance therefore provides the connective tissue through which national action can scale, and its architecture is diversifying rapidly. Sovereign green bonds, which generate financing earmarked for environmental projects, were first pioneered by France and Poland in 2016 and have now been issued by more than 40 countries. The Bridgetown Initiative has introduced a form of adaptive solidarity, allowing temporary pauses in debt repayments after natural disasters to free up liquid assets for recovery and resilience. And so-called debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps, such as those implemented in Belize and Ecuador, link fiscal stability directly with conservation outcomes by reducing or refinancing sovereign debt in return for verified environmental action.
Above all, the future balance between autonomy and interdependence will be shaped by technology. Innovation expands what governments can achieve, enabling cleaner energy, smarter pollution monitoring, and more resilient agriculture. But the decisive variable is no longer invention alone; it is how quickly technologies can be diffused, adapted to local conditions, and embedded in national capabilities. These benefits entail interdependence in data, intellectual property, and digital infrastructure, all of which reinforce the need for cooperation even as countries pursue technological autonomy.
Green innovation is accelerating fast: in 2025, green patent filings increased by around 20 percent worldwide. Most patents, however, are held in a handful of advanced economies. Diffusion channels are therefore critical: the UN’s Climate Technology Center and Network has funded nearly 400 technical assistance projects in more than 100 developing countries, and the World Intellectual Property Organization’s GREEN program connects providers of sustainability technologies with customers seeking to adopt them.
Smoke rising from a coal-fired power plant in Obilic, Kosovo, November 2025 Valdrin Xhemaj / Reuters
In addition to clean energy infrastructure, real-time digital monitoring is among the most powerful of environmental technologies, transforming the possibilities for environmental action and governance. Platforms such as Climate TRACE, Global Forest Watch, and Global Fishing Watch use global satellite data and artificial intelligence to track emissions, deforestation, and ocean activity in near real time, giving governments levels of visibility that were unthinkable a decade ago. These systems show how openness and collaboration can strengthen rather than compromise autonomy.
Entrepreneurs sit at the frontier of turning this diffusion into practical actions that can make respective states’ autonomy more connected. By applying proven technologies to local challenges—from using AI to optimize irrigation to building circular manufacturing systems—entrepreneurs use global knowledge to strengthen national resilience and share their progress. Platforms such as UpLink, which identifies and incubates sustainability-focused innovations, allow these actors to share insights, attract investment, and connect with partners worldwide.
A similar logic underpins the World Economic Forum’s Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which help governments and businesses apply new technologies responsibly and collaboratively. For example, its AI for Agriculture Innovation initiative links data infrastructure, public-private partners, and regional policy pilots, enabling farmers in multiple countries to adopt climate-smart practices much more rapidly than isolated national programs could. Initiatives like this turn technology diffusion into a form of connected autonomy, strengthening domestic capabilities by linking them to global expertise.
A third enabler of connected autonomy lies in the evolution of networked institutional architecture. A maturing generation of platforms, protocols, and standards is enabling interoperability and trust across borders. These frameworks do not legislate, mobilize, finance, or invent technologies, but they shape how information, capital, and accountability are distributed across the public and private sectors and civil society. Unlike traditional governance, this architecture is decentralized and adaptive. It functions more like a set of protocols than treaties. From its inception, the World Economic Forum has helped convene the hybrid coalitions—public, private, civic—that underpin this decentralized architecture.
Such decentralized architectures are also shaping the emergence of new green markets in which hybrid coalitions help scale technologies that no single government or firm can develop alone. The First Movers Coalition offers one example: it aggregates the long-term purchasing commitments of major companies in hard-to-abate sectors, using these demand signals to unlock investment and bring early clean-industrial projects to financial close.
Some of the most influential environmental frameworks follow this hybrid coalition model, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for corporate emission accounting and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures for firms reporting climate risk. These frameworks derive their authority not from national mandates but from uptake, credibility, and impact. The model has limits: as influence grows, so do questions about transparency and accountability and inefficiencies from decentralized action. But in a world of fast-moving interdependence, these solutions are proving both agile and resilient.
CONNECTING AUTONOMY
The reassertion of national autonomy is reshaping global environmental governance not by replacing cooperation but by redefining how it happens. Formal treaties remain an important pillar of shared ambition, but the real work now lies in how states, markets, and institutions connect their individual strategies within those pacts.
Across sectors, the pattern is clear: when state action is linked through shared architectures that expand access to finance, accelerate the diffusion of technology, and strengthen accountability and transparency, ambition translates into tangible results. Connected autonomy, with countries aligned through networks of trust, data, and shared standards, has become a new engine of environmental progress in a politically fragmented yet deeply interconnected world.
The task for international organizations and coalitions is to ensure that autonomy remains cooperative rather than isolated: to align incentives, mobilize capital, diffuse technologies, and sustain confidence that diverse actions lead to collective outcomes. Today, success will be defined less by grand bargains than by whether different global centers of action can move in concert toward shared prosperity.
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