ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the global governance implications of the Net-Zero Transition. Over a relatively short period (2015–21), decades of resistance and denial to climate change have given way to a simultaneous race and scramble: a race for new technologies and sources of renewable energy and a scramble for the key resources of the future. These will determine who leads, prospers and suffers in the next era. Net-zero pledges and low-carbon strategies are still too unspecific to give a clear sense of their consequences today. But the chapter examines two major ways the transition will affect international relations and global governance. First, the study identifies a group of states that will experience unprecedented vulnerability and threats to their social stability. Second, as competition grows for new low-carbon materials, technologies and markets, the transition itself will create new interstate tensions and conflict. These two patterns will together stress test existing multilateral/regional institutions and processes well beyond the climate governance architecture, will prompt reform of the international financial institutions, will require rationalisation of the new institutions that have proliferated in recent years and will likely see additional institutions and state groupings emerge.
