Published June 7, 2026
By Lien Vandamme, Senior Campaigner, Erika Lennon, Senior Attorney, and Nikki Reisch, Climate and Energy Director, at the Center for International Environmental Law.
Governments and climate leaders gather June 8-18 in Bonn, Germany, for the 64th climate negotiations of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB64) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Coming midway between COP30 in Belém, Brazil and COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, these negotiations are not just another procedural stop on the climate calendar. They are the first UN climate talks after three developments that have sharpened the stakes for climate action, accountability, and effective multilateralism.
Belém exposed once again the limits of a consensus-based process that is failing to deliver the ambition, finance, and accountability required to curtail climate change and confront accelerating climate harm. The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, demonstrated that momentum toward a fossil fuel phaseout is growing and will continue moving forward, including outside the UNFCCC. And the UN General Assembly’s resolution on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) climate Advisory Opinion confirmed that the global majority is ready to operationalize States’ legal obligations on climate action and accountability.
Taken together, these developments show that international cooperation can work when the global majority refuses to allow obstruction and delay by a small number of countries to define the limits of what is possible. They also make one thing clear: business-as-usual approaches to the UN climate talks no longer cut it. The question in Bonn is whether Parties and the incoming COP31 Presidency will meet this moment and establish concrete pathways to transform the UNFCCC into a multilateral space up to the task at hand: preventing the climate crisis and its impacts from accelerating further, and supporting those countries and communities already bearing its costs.
All of these developments are unfolding in a broader geopolitical context marked by escalating attacks on international law, militarization, war, genocide, shrinking civic space, and widening impunity for human rights violations. At a time when powerful actors are attempting to erode the rules-based international order, defending effective multilateralism means insisting on accountability for all violations of international law.
Santa Marta Showed That Momentum is Mounting
The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in Santa Marta, Colombia, marked a significant political moment. It brought together governments, civil society, workers, Indigenous Peoples, frontline communities, experts, and advocates around a critical question the climate talks have failed to confront: how can the world equitably and effectively transition away from fossil fuels?
Santa Marta did not undermine the UNFCCC. It underscored why the UNFCCC must evolve.
For more than three decades, the UN climate process has struggled to address the root cause of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. Belém exposed once again the limits of a consensus-based process that is failing to deliver the ambition, finance, and accountability required to confront accelerating climate harm. Even as science, the law, and the lived reality of communities all point in the same direction, fossil fuel interests and high-emitting countries continue to delay, dilute, and obstruct meaningful progress.
Santa Marta showed that countries ready to move further and faster do not need to wait indefinitely for those intent on blocking action. It showed that multilateralism can work when ambition is not reduced to the lowest common denominator. And it reinforced that climate action will increasingly move through multiple, complementary pathways: through the UNFCCC, through a potential Fossil Fuel Treaty, through courts and advisory opinions, through national policy, through financial regulation, through trade and investment spaces, and through movement-led pressure.
That is not fragmentation. It is what responding to a crisis of this scale requires.
The fossil fuel-driven climate crisis is too big for one process to solve. Climate change has outgrown any single negotiating space; it touches nearly every aspect of life and every sector of the economy and society. And fossil fuels are bigger than climate alone: they are embedded in trade, finance, investment, and development, and adversely affect health, human rights, peace, and the environment. No single legal instrument or forum can carry the whole burden. The task now is to ensure that each space does what it is best positioned to do — and that the UNFCCC becomes fit for the role this moment demands.
The UNFCCC needs reform to be fit for purpose
In Bonn, States have to support reforms that would make the UNFCCC more effective, accountable, transparent, inclusive, and protected from corporate capture.
Such reform is about strengthening multilateralism and choosing global cooperation and equity in the face of accelerating climate impacts and attacks on the rule of law. It is about ensuring that the climate regime can respond to the crisis as it exists today and that States uphold legal obligations that have existed for decades. The countries and communities least responsible for and most affected by the crisis should not be forced to wait for big historic and current polluters to discover political will.
That starts with decision-making. The consensus model has too often allowed a small number of countries to block progress supported by the majority. Recent developments—including the UNGA resolution on the ICJ Advisory Opinion—show that decision-making is possible when majority voting prevents obstruction from prevailing.
Ironically, countries never decided to decide things by consensus in the UNFCCC. It’s a default option that has been in place since a handful of petro-States blocked the adoption of the rules of procedure at the first Conference of the Parties (COP1). Three decades later, in the face of widespread human rights violations on a warming planet, States have a duty to disrupt the status quo: they must put decision-making back on the agenda and adopt these rules, including the one on voting in the absence of consensus, once and for all.
While it won’t solve everything, allowing the UNFCCC to make decisions by majority rather than consensus will help overcome the inertia that has paralyzed the process. With sufficient political will, voting could unlock long-awaited progress and cooperation on matters such as the public provision of climate finance and an equitable fossil fuel phase-out, in line with existing obligations as set out in the Convention and beyond. It can help transform the UNFCCC into a space where long-neglected topics such as reparations for climate harm, and the imperative to demilitarize in the face of the climate crisis, and rising issues such as the exploding energy use and related emissions of Artificial Intelligence and data centers, could be addressed more effectively.
In addition to its decision-making process, the UNFCCC also needs to address other major issues hindering its effectiveness, such as corporate capture of the space, its lack of transparency, barriers to meaningful and effective participation of rightsholders, and its weak compliance mechanisms.
Reform is necessary for the UNFCCC to complement the growing momentum outside its halls — not by duplicating those efforts, but by ensuring that climate negotiations deliver the finance, accountability, safeguards, and international cooperation required for a just and equitable transition.
This includes removing barriers that prevent States from taking ambitious climate actions, such as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms, embedded in trade and investment agreements that allow fossil fuel companies and other investors to sue governments over public interest measures, including climate policies. These mechanisms can chill ambition, delay phaseout, and force States to pay polluters instead of protecting people and the planet. High and rising debt burdens can divert resources from needed climate action and drive countries to expand fossil fuel extraction. As Bonn hosts discussions on trade, finance, and the alignment of financial flows with the Paris Agreement, Parties must urgently address legal and economic barriers that stand in the way of implementation.
It also means ensuring that the UNFCCC does not become a venue for legitimizing false solutions. Carbon offsets, carbon capture and storage, speculative carbon dioxide removal technologies, and geoengineering cannot substitute for a rapid, equitable, and rights-based transition away from fossil fuels. These approaches risk prolonging fossil fuel dependence, shifting burdens onto communities, and distracting from the urgent need to cut emissions at source.
The Law Must Guide Climate Negotiations
Bonn also takes place in the wake of major developments in international law. The ICJ AO has made clear that climate action is not an aspiration, but a legal obligation. States’ legal duties to prevent, mitigate, and remedy climate harm – and to cooperate effectively toward that end – are grounded in international law, human rights, equity, and intergenerational justice.
This legal clarity must inform climate negotiations.
The recent UN General Assembly resolution not only welcomes the ICJ’s opinion, but confirms States’ commitment to uphold the obligations it clarifies – for example, by affirming the continuity of statehood in the face of sea level rise, thereby adding political weight to the Court’s conclusions. This demonstrates once again the type of decisions that could be made in the UNFCCC once it breaks free from its consensus-based inertia.
The ICJ developments have concrete implications for the UNFCCC. Countries cannot claim to support the rule of law in the UNGA and flout it in the UNFCCC. Laggard States can’t keep hiding behind the process while advancing negotiating positions that ignore their obligations to prevent climate harm, cooperate internationally, phase out fossil fuels, provide finance, and ensure remedy and reparations for those already suffering loss and damage. The UNFCCC must be a space where legal obligations are upheld and operationalized, not avoided – and where accountability is possible when compliance fails.
This is especially important in the current geopolitical context. The same forces that are eroding international law through war, militarization, genocide, and other human rights violations, also undermine accountability in climate governance. Defending the rule of law in Bonn means insisting that climate negotiations align with States’ legal obligations — and refusing to normalize impunity, whether for climate destruction or other grave violations of international law.
Bonn Must Show the UNFCCC Can Evolve
As Parties come together in Bonn, they should build support for concrete reforms to decision-making, advance discussions on conflicts of interest and corporate capture, strengthen protections for human rights and civic space, integrate the legal obligations clarified by international courts into negotiation outcomes, and identify practical ways for the UNFCCC to complement the growing momentum for fossil fuel phaseout beyond its halls.
Belém showed the limits of the current process and the cost of consensus, which leaves progress vulnerable to obstruction. Santa Marta showed that countries and movements are no longer waiting for the slowest actors to define what is possible. The UNGA resolution on the ICJ Advisory Opinion showed that the global majority is prepared to move climate law from principle to practice.
Bonn must show that the UNFCCC can keep up.
The climate crisis is too urgent, the legal obligations too clear, and the momentum too strong for another round of talks that treats delay as diplomacy. The task now is not to choose between the UNFCCC and action beyond it. The task is to make every space capable of delivering what science, justice, and the law require.