Our Global Public Goods

A boy carrying kindling in Kapisa province, Afghanistan. Kindling is used in rural areas for heating homes and cooking. War and poverty have contributed to the loss of more than 70 percent of the country’s forests in the last two decades.

In December 2009, the city of Copenhagen played host to governments from around the world as leaders met for two weeks of negotiations on a new international treaty on climate change. The current treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was developed in the mid-1990s and will expire in 2012. Scientists have learned a great deal about the dimensions and dynamics of the climate change problem since the Kyoto agreement was drafted.

A sense of urgency pervaded the event in Copenhagen, fueled by warnings from distinguished scientists about the world’s narrow window of opportunity to contain climate change at a manageable level. Preliminary negotiations had been in progress for two years. The public was impatient for governments to come to a meaningful agreement. More than 14 million people signed a petition (known as the “tck tck tck” petition) calling on governments to stop squabbling and finish the job,¹ and more than 100,000 people marched outside the Copenhagen proceedings to support the same goal.

But the meeting in Copenhagen did not lead to a breakthrough. The richest countries in the world—the ones whose commitment to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) is essential to achieving a meaningful deal—mostly repeated noncommittal pledges. Nor did they make any firmer commitments to provide assistance to the developing countries that are already bearing or are expected to bear the brunt of the damage from climate change—even though these countries’ share of GHGs is a fraction of their own. In the end, no leader committed his or her country to taking action that is anywhere near commensurate with the scope of the problem.

The failure of Copenhagen highlights how difficult it is to achieve international cooperation when economic issues are at stake. Climate change is every bit as much an economic issue as an environmental one.

Climate may be the ultimate example of a global public good—meaning something that is shared across borders, across generations, by all populations, and that all depend on to thrive.² When a global public good is threatened, it affects everyone and takes everyone working together to solve the problem. It’s not possible for any one country to adequately respond to the threat by itself.

This chapter focuses on three interconnected global public goods: climate, global food and nutrition security, and trade. International cooperation on one of these public goods spurs progress on the others. Conversely, a setback or communication breakdown in one is bound to jeopardize progress on the others.

Issues