For much of the past three decades, climate change has been treated as a policy problem sitting alongside others: environment, energy, development. That framing is no longer adequate. Climate is now entangled with food systems, energy security, migration, public health, finance, polarisation and conflict – what many now describe as the meta-crisis: overlapping systemic stresses interacting faster than our institutions can respond.
This shift matters because climate outcomes are no longer determined primarily by science, technology or grassroots initiatives. They are increasingly determined by geopolitics.
The uncomfortable truth is that we can have the best climate science in the world – yet still fail if geopolitical conditions undermine cooperation, investment, and trust. Conversely, modest policy advances can scale rapidly if geopolitical alignments support them.
This is why recent remarks by Mark Carney at Davos are worth paying attention to. Carney’s intervention was not a climate speech in the conventional sense. It was a geopolitical one. His central claim – that a group of “middle powers” may now carry disproportionate responsibility for global stability – implicitly recognises that meaningful climate action can no longer wait for consensus among great powers.
That is a profound shift.
When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. (Mark Carney)
Since the end of the Cold War, global governance has largely assumed a unipolar world. Even when US leadership was inconsistent, the underlying architecture – trade rules, financial systems, multilateral institutions – reflected American primacy. Climate agreements like Kyoto and Paris were negotiated within that assumption.
That world is fading.
The United States is now internally divided and increasingly unreliable on climate. China, meanwhile, is leading in certain climate-critical industries – renewables, batteries, electric transport – while remaining ambivalent about broader ecological limits. The result is a fragmented landscape where climate action advances in some domains and stalls in others.
Into this gap step the middle powers.
Countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and parts of Europe are not superpowers. But collectively they shape trade flows, standards, finance, and technology diffusion. Crucially, many of them are also grappling with the contradictions of transition – fossil fuel dependence alongside climate ambition.
This makes them both compromised and representative.
The significance of this moment is not that a new bloc has formally emerged – it hasn’t – but that climate is quietly becoming a driver of geopolitical realignment, rather than a downstream concern. Energy systems, food resilience, and ecological stability are increasingly recognised as matters of security, not simply sustainability.
If this continues, we may look back on this decade as the point when climate stopped being “an issue” and became the organising context for global politics.
That would place it alongside the end of the Cold War as a structural shift, not because the outcome is predetermined, but because the rules of the game are changing.
This post was developed with the assistance of AI as a thinking and drafting partner. Responsibility for the analysis and views expressed rests entirely with the author. Our next post expands on the return of the middle powers.
Climate Action Tai Tokerau 