We live in a time of extremes. Threats to human wellbeing multiply and intensify, demanding global cooperation. While rapid technological change provides tools to confront these threats, from new vaccines to new sources of energy, the mechanisms of cooperation between countries are under unprecedented strain.
Making progress on global challenges happen now requires diplomacy that goes beyond the obvious engagement with the like-minded. The European Union and Member States like Greece have both the capacity and the incentive to contribute.
Tech diplomacy to fight the climate crisis shows what can be done.
This has been another summer that brought the consequences of climate change home. For too many, the traditional vacation season has become a burning season. While the immediate causes of wildfires are local, climate change is fanning the flames. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found ‘emerging evidence that recent regional surges in wildland fires are being driven by changing weather extremes’. The IPCC has also reported ‘high confidence in fire weather increase in the Mediterranean region’.
Climate change is a global problem but its impacts are not evenly distributed. As the IPCC has found, the Mediterranean region is ‘a hotspot for highly interconnected climate risks’ – warming 20% faster than the global average, with temperatures already breaching the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels.
This means that literally fighting the fires will not be enough to solve this problem. What’s needed is a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to enable us to reach global net zero – meaning humanity is no longer pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it is removing.
The EU is a declining contributor to GHG emissions, responsible for less than 6% of global emissions in 2025. Emerging and developing economies are driving most of the growth. So, we need international cooperation both to deal with climate impacts like wildfires and to help other countries to decouple economic development from climate pollution.
This international cooperation is created and managed through diplomacy – negotiations, representation and the building of relationships. In multilateral contexts like UN Climate Change, the diplomacy is structured through institutions. The UN Climate Change Conference of Parties established an in-house ‘Technology Mechanism’ in 2010 to grow international climatetech cooperation. This institution includes the Technology Executive Committee, which advises the COP, and the Climate Technology Centre & Network or CTCN, which provides practical support to developing countries.
Greece has chaired the Technology Executive Committee and the CTCN Advisory Board at different times during the past five years. Over this period, the UN has endured an unprecedented stress test: the pandemic, multiple wars, the second US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and massive cuts to development funding.
The experience of chairing under these conditions suggests the following lessons on how diplomacy can help systems under pressure to deliver:
First, effective coordination among EU members is necessary – but not sufficient – for positive outcomes. Because the EU is the largest climate finance contributor and typically has multiple members on any given committee, a shared approach by EU members will be influential. This makes time devoted to EU coordination time well-spent.
In the CTCN, a ‘Team Europe’ approach helped us to raise the spending cap on projects in developing countries and to negotiate an increased budget – not as much as Global South members wanted but enabling the climatetech centre to buck the trend of cuts elsewhere. Crucially, we did this while focusing the centre’s work on more impactful programmes.
Second, the ‘Team Europe’ approach provides the point of departure for outreach to non-EU members to secure decisions and their implementation. This outreach includes but should not be limited to longstanding developed country partners. In the UN climate system, a chair from a developed country will always be working with a vice-chair from a developing country and vice versa. This working relationship fails when it is adversarial and succeeds when both are open to finding a creative synthesis reflecting both developed and developing country priorities.
By engaging directly with developing country members on the CTCN board, EU members helped to shape programmes that are delivering tangible assistance while reflecting EU priorities. This includes targeted support for Eastern European developing countries – like those in the Western Balkans – that had previously been overlooked. CTCN projects in Georgia and North Macedonia are harnessing technology to improve wildfire readiness, with more projects in Eastern Europe to come. Efforts like these are building the resilience of EU candidate countries to face climate change-fuelled disasters.
Third, the UN machine – elected members and secretariats – needs to be turned outwards and focused on working with partners that can bring scale and reach to its mission: Development finance, businesses, researchers, philanthropies. US withdrawal and cutbacks by other traditional contributors have made it even more necessary to borrow the strength of others. In a highly regulated UN context that prizes process and mandates, this is difficult work. Getting it done means respecting UN processes but navigating them to get the most possible out of the system. It helps to identify a clear opportunity that partnerships can be built around.
Three years ago, generative AI had exploded into public consciousness. But there wasn’t any process in the UN system dedicated to what AI means for climate. So we created one. The enormous consequences of AI for climate change made it easier to focus the necessary contributors on building a partnership-driven initiative. The value of having an inclusive, UN-based process made it attractive for external partners – technologists, development finance bodies and expert communities – to work with us. Today, #AI4ClimateAction is a global initiative providing technical assistance, capacity-building and open source applications.
The lessons drawn from this period of tech diplomacy aren’t meant to suggest that the outcomes were perfect. I have never seen consensus decision-making produce a perfect outcome. Like most diplomacy, the outcomes were compromises. But in an international system with weak or non-existent means of enforcement, decisions that reflect everyone’s concerns at least stand a chance of being implemented.
Nor can the EU – and still less an individual EU chair – claim credit for any of these results, which belong to all the members, staff and partners that work on them, including very constructive US members while the US was still engaged. This is about how EU Member States can contribute to shaping collective outcomes – above all, by helping to create the conditions for effective teamwork.
In the lean years ahead for climate and development finance, diplomacy will be crucial to maximising results with limited resources. All EU Member States regardless of size have a role to play. Greece, as a state on the climate frontlines with experience in tough diplomacy and strong ties to key developing countries, has much to offer.
Stephen Minas is a professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law and served as chair of the CTCN Advisory Board and of the Technology Executive Committee.
