How have environmental issues forced us to rethink world politics?

The environment and the human footprint have been an issue in world politics for decades. Nevertheless, it has recently been made a key issue by social movements across the world by citizens. This has been key in rethinking world politics, it is clear that it no longer is an interstate relations system but a system where states, firms and private citizens interact. It has also made us rethink the way states interact with each other. While there usually is competition between states, environmental issues have forced states to collaborate to tackle an issue that affects them all equally. These issues have made more evident the disparities between countries, regarding their development or the size, and the impact environmentally friendly policies would have on those.

Realists believe that the pursuit of power, status and wealth is rarely absent from international deliberation (Vogler, 2019). Nevertheless, environmental issues have forced the international community to recognise that cooperation is needed to reverse or prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change. We have seen this change happening with the Paris Climate Accord, and although the US dropped out it will join again once Joe Biden is president (Newburger, 2020). Nevertheless, this rethinking of world politics has been happening for a longer time. In 1972, the United Nations established the Environment Programme (UNEP) which has the aim to “enable nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations” (UNEP, 2020). Therefore, this shows that environmental issues have forced us to rethink world politics in ways that today’s actions do noy harm or destroy the future planet Earth.

World politics has been focused for years on interstate relations. Nevertheless, environmental issues have shown us that world politics is not only abut states interacting with each other. Individual citizens and NGOs have been key for this change to happen.

Greta Thunberg and the movement Fridays for the Future have built a global network of concerned citizens regarding climate change, organising strikes all across the world, going over borders. This social movement have had such a massive impact on world politics that Thunberg was invited to Davos, UN conferences and other international summits. This shows how world politics has shifted from interstate relations to a more global system where businesses, individuals and states interact with each other.

Environmental issues have also forced us to see not only that world politics isn’t about states alone, but that non state organisations and movements can sometimes do more than the states themselves to help the environment. This has been the case in replanting forests, where many NGOs, such as OneTreePlanted, have planted millions of trees to try and reverse the effects of climate change (OneTreePlanted, 2019). It was also clear in the Australian fires, when many species and people’s lives were threatened by the fires, individual donations raised to save them helped their rehabilitation (Kwai, 2020).

Environmental issues have also shown us the massive differences between developed countries and developing ones as well as small and large countries. While developed countries were able to grow and expand without any limitation of resources whatsoever, developing countries are being faced with pressure from the developed ones to reduce the amount of pollutants it produces or releases into the atmosphere. This has exuberated the already massive differences between the develop world and the developing one.

Moreover, the countries that produce most of the pollutants are suffering from climate change only so slightly, the US increase in tropical storms for example, while other small countries, who have done little to no harm to the environment are already suffering from sea levels rising and it could end with the oceans covering them (Law, 2019). This shows how environmental issues have forced us to rethink world politics because the actions of some affect others in more severe ways.

World politics but more precisely world economics, judge countries by their economic growth performance. Nevertheless, this economic growth can be, and usually is, build upon the use of non-renewable resources, such as oil or coal, or construction which also has a massive impact on the environment (Federal Bank of St. Louis, 2017). Therefore, this force us to rethink world politics as we have to also take into account how states treat the environment, as only focusing on economic growth will, in the long run, damage the growth of countries as their ecosystems will collapse.

To conclude, environmental issues have been key in making states, diplomats and average citizens rethink about the world political order and how this is organised. It has shed the light into many issues that had not been tackled before, such as sustainable development, and showed everyone that cooperation is needed if we want to solve the issues we as a planet face.

Bibliography

Federal Bank of St. Louis, 2017. The Effects of Economic Growth on Pollution. [Online] Available at: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/september/effects-economic-growth-pollution [Accessed 6 January 2021].

Kwai, I., 2020. Donations Are Pouring Into Australia. Now What?. The New York Times, 18 January.

Law, T., 2019. The Climate Crisis Is Global, but These 6 Places Face the Most Severe Consequences. TIME, 30 November.

Newburger, E., 2020. Biden will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. Here's what happens next. [Online] Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/20/biden-to-rejoin-paris-climate-accord-heres-what-happens-next-.html [Accessed 6 Janaury 2021].

OneTreePlanted, 2019. Planting Report 2019, s.l.: OneTreePlanted.

UNEP, 2020. About Us. [Online] Available at: https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment [Accessed 6th January 2021].

Vogler, J., 2019. Environmental issues. In: J. Baylis, S. Smith & P. Owens, eds. The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. s.l.:Oxford University Press.