One of the key problems with the current approach to environmental policy coordination and global climate governance is the reliance mostly on top-down comprehensive initiatives that aim to muster support and consensus from the entire international community. Such attempts have more often than not been met with coordination failures and backlashes across both developed and developing economies. What is proposed in the following article is a more bottom-up/piecemeal approach that seeks to build environmental policy momentum across the segments of the global economy represented by various climatic zones. Each of these climate zones has its idiosyncratic exigencies pertaining to environmental policy as well as its own array of national economies that may opt to participate in the respective environmental alliances.
The creation of a multi-layered model of environmental policy coordination across the main climate zones of the global economy in essence has already been kick-started at the level of equatorial/tropical layer with the launching of the Brazil-Indonesia-Congo (South America Amazon – Southeast Asia – Africa’s Congo Basin) alliance focused on rainforest protection. This crucial undertaking has been buttressed by the creation of a Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), launched in November 2025 at COP30 with USD 5.5 bn in pledged resources (the aim is to mobilize USD 125 bn)[1]. The TFFF operates on the basis of a “payment-for-performance” model via “mobilizing philanthropic, public and private capital, then reinvesting these resources in a diversified investment portfolio. Revenues generated by the TFFF will reward Tropical Forest Countries a fixed amount per hectare of conserved or restored forest while seeking to maintain the TFFF’s capital base, ensuring the facility’s long-term sustainability”[2].
With the equatorial layer of environmental policy coordination already being addressed by the international community, the idea of the proposed model is to scale such an arrangement to other segments of the global economy represented by other climatic zones, such as sub-tropical, the temperate, sub-polar and polar layers:
- Equatorial layer (already operational): Brazil-Indonesia-Congo; focus: rainforest protection, bioeconomy
- Subtropical/Savanna and Dryland layer: Southern Hemisphere: Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia)+Australia+parts of South America (Argentina); Northern Hemisphere: Sahel+India+Middle East; focus: land restoration, drought resilience
- Temperate layer: Northern Hemisphere: US, Europe, Canada, China, Japan, Korea temperate zones; Southern Hemisphere: Chile, New Zealand, parts of Argentina; focus: temperate forest management, sustainable agriculture
- Sub-polar: Northern Hemisphere: Russia-Canada-US-Scandinavia; Southern Hemisphere: Antarctic treaty as a model; focus: permafrost protection+boreal forest carbon
- Polar: Northern Hemisphere: Arctic Council; Southern Hemisphere: Antarctic treaty; focus: ice-sheet preservation/stability
The most feasible segment of the global economy where pan-hemispheric agreements objectively stand a decent chance of being adopted is the Southern Hemisphere in view of the relatively lower number of economies, most of which share important economic and geographic commonalities[3]. The attainment of consensus is facilitated by the absence of significant antagonisms and historical tensions among the largest economies of the region. Another possible platform where pan-hemispheric agreements may be relatively more accessible is the Western Hemisphere with its history of earlier efforts to build a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The farther northward from the equator and the closer to the Arctic circle, the more challenging politically appears to be the securing of climatic agreements and regional consensus. At the same time, the forging of climate treaties across the equator and the neighboring climate zones would account for a rising and dominant share of the global surface area[4], thus raising the “peer pressure” for the Northern regions to work harder on attaining consensus.
In terms of the scaling of the environmental policy initiatives from one of the hemispheres (we assume that it is most likely to be the Southern Hemisphere) to other parts of the global economy, we single out the following “hemispheric routes”:
- From Southern Hemisphere directly to Northern Hemisphere: some of the agreements launched in the Southern Hemisphere could be replicated selectively in the North, with the Southern Hemisphere trailblazing the effectiveness and operational modalities of such accords;
- From Southern Hemisphere to Western and Eastern Hemispheres as an intermediate stage to forming common horizontal platforms in the Northern Hemisphere: the overlaps between the Southern Hemisphere and Western/Eastern Hemispheres could be exploited to replicate/scale the coordination initiatives to the respective parts of the Northern Hemisphere;
- From the equatorial belt (the equatorial alliance) towards both the Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere: the already existing equatorial environmental alliance could be used as a base to expand the coverage of environmental accords in both directions;
The operational framework to carry out such a model of environmental policy coordination could be grounded in the hemispheric governance proposals that we developed in our recent publications[5] – an S5 platform representing the largest economies of the Southern Hemisphere in the G20[6] as well as a hemispheric QUAD representing the four hemispheres in global platforms such as COP and G20 (as part of a regional 20 (R20) engagement group). Given its scale, hemispheric governance may prove to be a more appropriate framework for addressing environmental policy coordination challenges and regional spillover effects compared to the country-to-country or even the region-to-region environmental agreements. A further element in this multi-layered system of environmental alliances could be the establishment of the respective funds along the lines of TFFF for each of the other climate zones complemented by alliances among the development institutions of these regions/climate zones (regional development banks, regional financing arrangements).
The emergence of new environmental alliances does not necessarily have to hinge solely on the mechanism of hemispheric governance – individual economies may form such alliances on a country-to-country or region-to-region basis as was the case with the equatorial alliance of Brazil-Indonesia-Congo to protect rain forests. But Hemispheric governance may significantly facilitate not only the creation of such alliances, but also their replication across the two hemispheres (from Southern to Northern Hemisphere) as well as their cooperation and coordination across the various climate zones.
In the end, as with globalization, efforts to build top-down environmental policy impulses will continue to face severe coordination issues, with more bottom-up approaches needed to sustain cooperative momentum. In this respect, global climate governance may benefit from the emergence of regional environmental alliances that cover climate zones such as the tropical and sub-tropical belts as well as temperate and mid-latitude layers. Hemispheric governance together with the coordination among the regional organizations and integration arrangements could serve to operationalize the creation of such environmental alliances as well as their cooperation and aggregation into larger-scale environmental accords. In this sequence of environmental alliances, the region of the Southern Hemisphere could play a crucial role in launching sustainable development/climate governance initiatives that may be further scaled across the rest of the world economy.
[1] https://www.wri.org/insights/financing-nature-conservation-tropical-forest-forever-facility
[2] https://tfff.earth/
[3] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/on-economic-commonalities-across-the-southern-hemisphere/
[4] The surface area of each successive latitudinal band becomes progressively smaller with motion from the equator to the North Pole
[5] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/hemispheric-governance-an-exercise-in-semi-globalism/
[6] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/the-southern-five-a-platform-to-balance-the-global-economy/
Yaroslav Lissovolik, Founder, BRICS+ Analytics
Image by Tho-Ge via Pixabay