The week that COP16 concluded in Cali, Donald Trump was days away from winning the US presidency. The Green Deal was facing its most serious internal resistance since its launch. And the Middle East was consuming the diplomatic bandwidth that climate negotiators needed elsewhere. It was, by any measure, a difficult moment for anyone still committed to the idea that international institutions can hold.
What struck me most about COP16 was not what was agreed — the language on biodiversity and food systems was reasonably ambitious — but the growing gap between what was committed and what anyone seriously believes will be implemented. That gap is not new. But it is widening, and the scaffolding is beginning to show.
The Trump problem is structural, not episodic
The instinct in Brussels and Geneva is to treat a second Trump term as a temporary disruption — something to be managed, worked around, waited out. That instinct is wrong. The deeper problem is that the architecture of international climate cooperation was designed for a world in which the United States was a willing, if imperfect, participant. That world no longer reliably exists.
This is not a reason for paralysis. It is a reason for honesty about what multilateral frameworks can and cannot deliver without US engagement — and for redesigning cooperation accordingly. The EU's continued role as a credible anchor in the climate system matters more now, not less. But credibility requires delivery, and delivery requires confronting the implementation gap at home before lecturing elsewhere.
COP16 and the accountability problem
The biodiversity pledges that emerged from Cali are serious on paper. The problem is that "serious on paper" has become the default mode of international environmental governance. There are commitments, there are monitoring frameworks, there are review cycles. What there is not, consistently, is enforcement.
Nature restoration targets, food systems transitions, climate finance flows to the Global South — all of these require domestic political will that is unevenly distributed and structurally fragile. Pledging in a conference hall is easy. Maintaining that pledge through an election cycle, a budget crisis, or a shift in governing coalition is not.
The question worth asking after COP16 is not whether the agreements were ambitious enough. It is whether the accountability mechanisms are robust enough to survive contact with political reality. On current evidence, they are not.
What this means in practice
For organisations working at the intersection of climate, food systems, and advocacy, the lesson from this moment is not to double down on the multilateral track alone. It is to work simultaneously on the institutional and political conditions that make implementation possible — building the coalitions, the narratives, and the governance structures that outlast any single conference outcome.
The scaffolding showing is not a reason to abandon the building. It is a reason to reinforce the foundations.