Environmental breakdown is accelerating and poses an unprecedented threat to international cooperation. A new positive-sum model of international cooperation is needed, which should seek to realise a more sustainable, just and prepared world.
This necessarily requires communities and countries to better recognise their cumulative contribution to environmental breakdown, and their current capability to act. Wealthy nations and communities not only contribute most to the stock of environmental breakdown, they preside over and benefit from an economic development model founded on unsustainable environmental impacts and global power imbalance.
We argue that a wealthy nation with a relatively large contribution to environmental breakdown like the UK should shoulder greater responsibility than it does at present.
