As COP falters, South Asia must build its own collaborative climate platform

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The message emerging from global negotiations at this year's COP30 is unmistakable: the world is on the verge of slipping past the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, and the window for meaningful action is rapidly narrowing. Despite urgent warnings from the United Nations and decades of promises, the global north continues to fall short on its commitments to finance, equity, and climate justice—even over 30 years after the Earth Summit first set a collective direction in Brazil. With the Paris Agreement struggling to deliver ambition at the scale and pace required, calls for a renewed, reimagined form of climate multilateralism—one shaped by the priorities, realities, and leadership of the global south—have become louder and more compelling than ever.

In this moment of reckoning, we, parliamentarians from some of the world's most climate-vulnerable South Asian countries, put forward the idea of regional climate multilateralism as a concrete response to that call. We see this as a model grounded in solidarity and justice but animated by the urgency that COP30 has made impossible to ignore. Such a framework must enable South Asian nations to pool scale, resources, knowledge, and diverse climate needs, while sharing technological and financial capacities in sectors where transformation cannot wait.

Source: Wikipedia