Manuel Pulgar-Vidal: The next decade will be decisive. What comes after could be transformative

The planet’s environmental future will not follow a straight line. The coming decade is likely to bring significant challenges: weakened institutions, besieged multilateralism and a geopolitical landscape that once again places fossil fuels and critical minerals at the centre of power struggles. Yet it is also a decade in which the foundations for a more effective and resilient transition can be laid, provided we change the lens through which we view the problem.

Why Manuel Pulgar-Vidal? Few people have observed the evolution of global environmental governance from as many vantage points. As Peru’s environment minister and president of COP20 in Lima in 2014, Pulgar-Vidal was at the heart of the climate negotiations in the crucial year before the Paris Agreement. Today, he is the global leader on climate and energy at WWF. His experience across government, multilateral negotiations and civil society gives particular weight to the question at the heart of this essay: if the environmental architecture built over recent decades is weakening, what should replace it?

It is this dual perspective – short-term pessimism, coupled with the real possibility of reconstruction in the longer term – that I wish to explore here. The way forward does not lie in abandoning multilateralism or resigning ourselves to fragmentation, but rather in rebuilding from a different perspective.

A weakening that is already evident

Let us begin with what is happening to the structures that govern environmental affairs. In Latin America, in particular, environmental ministries or secretariats – the institutional architecture regarded as the centre of environmental management – have been merged, dissolved or scaled back. The further down the scale of government we go, from the national to the regional and local levels, the bleaker the picture becomes: less capacity, fewer resources, less scope for action.

Part of this is a political offensive. But part of it is also self-criticism: these institutions never managed to gain a foothold in the real centres of power such as the ministries of finance and infrastructure or the presidency itself. That distance diminished their relevance. Europe is already beginning to rectify this design by merging climate change with energy and production into a single portfolio, because it recognises that these three issues are one and the same. It is a path that Latin America should watch closely.

Added to this institutional fragility is a relentless geopolitical race for natural resources. The critical minerals needed for informational technologies coexist with a renewed appetite for fossil fuels, exacerbated by the crises in Iran and Ukraine, which have driven up oil and gas prices and made their extraction and transport more difficult. Initiatives such as Colombia’s drive to transition away from fossil fuels or Brazil’s roadmap are steps in the right direction, but they remain modest: the world of finance is still far from becoming the key driver of the change we need.

Underlying all this is a deeper crisis: that of multilateralism itself. We have made significant progress in addressing climate change through the Paris Agreement and in protecting biodiversity through the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework. Yet momentum has been fading under pressure from far-right governments and climate deniers who are dismantling their own scientific and institutional structures and accusing the multilateral approach of being slow and ineffective. This accusation is deeply misguided but it has taken hold. Meanwhile, evidence of the planetary crisis continues to mount: heatwaves and wildfires, a “super” El Niño and intensifying forced displacement.

There is also a technological divide that reproduces the very inequalities that caused the crisis: the development of clean technologies remains concentrated in the Global North, and, in some cases, Global North countries themselves or emerging economies sell obsolete technology to the Global South. Nevertheless, real innovation is underway. Solar and wind energy have fallen in price and are being rolled out at an ever-faster pace. We are already seeing the first steps towards synthetic fuels, with sectors such as the maritime industry converting their fleets.

I believe that, in time, it will become clear that the climate action strategy was the right one.

I conclude this analysis with three fronts that are rarely mentioned together yet are deeply interconnected.

Disinformation, which has become the rule rather than the exception and strikes at the heart of a young generation growing up with these technologies. Next, the undermining of science and the attempt to impose current political agendas that hamper the decision-making capacity of bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, precisely at a time when all its predictions – even the most severe ones – have been coming true. And third, the loss of civic space, including increasing attacks on civil society organisations, which, let us not forget, were the main architects of the environmental framework we have today.

All this is happening in a world that has turned its back on global cooperation and is turning in on itself. Critically, environmental issues, which require collaboration, are undermined every time geopolitics turns in on itself.

Four new lenses through which to view the same world

Faced with this landscape, the question that interests me most is not how serious the crisis is – we already know that – but through which lenses we will now view it, because the lenses we have used thus far have left us short-sighted.

The first lens concerns multilateralism. I do not believe we should abandon it. It remains, with all its limitations, the most legitimate form of collective decision-making. What is in crisis is its top-down version. That is why I am convinced by the idea put forward by Brazil’s proposal at COP31 for a two-track approach to multilateralism: to rebuild, in parallel, a bottom-up model, made of new coalitions, new alliances and processes that do not depend exclusively on consensus among states.

The second lens is economics. We need to continue strengthening the narrative that the world is moving – slowly, but not backwards – towards an economy that places the highest priority on climate and biodiversity. At a time when politics has largely abandoned this debate, it is up to the economy to take up the baton. Within the economy, one actor – the financial sector – has yet to recognise its role. Technology, science, governance and civil society are already moving in the right direction, but it is the financial system – investment funds, asset owners, stock exchanges – that must turn that momentum into something stable and lasting. We have not yet succeeded in getting the financial sector to fulfil that central role. But we know, with increasing clarity, what needs to happen to achieve it.

The third lens is systemic. We must stop treating climate change, biodiversity loss, the water crisis, environmental health and plastic pollution as separate silos and start demanding that our institutions, our policy frameworks, and our national climate plans adopt a synergistic approach in which a single action has positive effects on several fronts at once.

The fourth lens is science and information. In an era of growing climate uncertainty – where even meteorologists find it harder to anticipate phenomena that were once predictable – science remains the closest thing we have to a reliable compass. Strengthening it and winning ground against disinformation are not secondary priorities. They are prerequisites for the other three lenses to function.

None of these four lenses is sufficient on its own. But combined, they begin to outline a path distinct from the one we have followed so far: a multilateralism rebuilt from the ground up, an economy that makes climate considerations a prerequisite for competitiveness, a system of governance that ceases to fragment efforts to address the planetary crisis, and a science strengthened against disinformation.

I still believe the next five or ten years will be difficult, and that it would be naive to promise otherwise. But I am also convinced that we already know, with a fair degree of precision, which pieces we are missing to ensure the next decade is different from this one. The question we should be asking ourselves, at every negotiating table, in every finance ministry and on every investment board, is simple: how can we ensure that all this pressure, rather than destroying us, finally gives us the stable energy we have been seeking for two decades?