The three clocks of the climate transition

I was sitting in an unusually hot conference room in Copenhagen when the news of the devastating Nepal floods appeared on my laptop screen. 

As a panel of international climate lawyers discussed the ideal ways in which law should respond to climate change in the years to come, dozens of villages and towns were washed away in real time.

I had come to Denmark for the 13th European Environmental Law Forum to present a paper I recently published on the need to embed critical mineral governance in the Paris Agreement. 

The article proposed adopting a decision under the Agreement that explicitly called for governing critical minerals value chains in the context of the energy transition, accounting for the environmental and human rights impacts of their extraction. 

And just as I had done a few days before at another international law conference in Cambridge, I was planning to come to the podium with the same speech. 

I was about to present “an ideal” conceptualisation of what critical mineral governance should look like under the energy transition, but as we all knew, it had slim possibilities of happening under the current system. I even included a citation at the end of my presentation by Koskenniemi (2012), which said: “Law is an expression of the midpoint between a society’s aspirational values and what is actually possible.”

As I heard the other presentations, many of which analysed the system’s faults and what needed to happen to see real change, I realised that, like me, most scholars and international lawyers classified their own ideas as “utopias” or “aspirations.” 

Sitting in that conference room, I realised that I had never stopped to ask myself where this “impossibility” came from, and more importantly, how the system had turned into that monstrous creature that, the more we knew about it, the harder it seemed to tame.

After some reflection, something came to mind. Perhaps the monster was never climate change, or the political and legal system, but something much more ordinary: time. 

The climate transition, unlike our lives, does not unfold in a single timeline.  Instead, it moves according to three different clocks, each ticking at its own pace and dimension.

The first one is the clock of climate change. Since the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gas emissions have been accumulating for centuries, severely altering our climate systems, but we have reached a point where natural disasters can end the lives of

thousands of people in hours. 

Unfortunately, Nepal is not an exception, but just one more in an innumerable list of climate tragedies that do not wait for new negotiations or treaties. We have reached a point where this clock runs to the rhythm of urgency, and we either find solutions or more and more communities will pay the price.

The second one is the clock of our economies. Replacing an entire economic system based on fossil fuels requires remaking entire supply chains, industries, and infrastructure. 

Industrial and economic transformation can take decades, and for developing countries like the Philippines, it raises many questions about development, justice, and equity. 

How can we replace an entire economic system fast enough to respond to climate change, but well-thought-out enough to account for the different development realities of countries around the world?

 

The third clock dictates the pace at which governance institutions and international law operate and change. Governing the energy transition also requires transforming the political and legal institutions built around an economic system powered by fossil fuels and shaped by decades of globalisation. 

Our current legal institutions were not created to sustain the change or the speed of the transformation we are asking of them. For instance, many international investment law provisions, such as international dispute settlement, were designed to provide stability and security to investors, even at the expense of environmental or human rights protections. 

For instance, the UN Trade and Development Agency (UNCTAD) identified at least 175 treaty-based ISDS cases brought against countries for taking environmental protection measures between 1987 and 2021. 

So how can we change a system using tools designed to protect the current one? If my proposal is true, the question becomes: if we cannot make the clocks run at the same pace, how can we create governance tools that account for these disparities?

How can we create measures of adaptation for the communities living the consequences now while guaranteeing long-term investment for economic transformations? How can we build new governance and legal institutions that account for the challenges of our time?

My visit to Copenhagen ultimately left me with the reflection that the climate transition is also a human transition moving at a pace we are not keeping up with. We are not only aiming to change our economic, industrial, and energy systems, but also how we, as individuals and societies, engage with the world around us, and how we transform and adapt our institutions to the challenges of climate change. 

Only when we start to account for these time differences will we be able to build solutions that stop looking like utopian ideals.

Gretel Cuevas is a researcher and writer whose work explores the intersection of critical minerals, the energy transition, and economic development. Her research focuses on how resource-rich countries can build more equitable and sustainable futures through better governance, industrial policy, and international cooperation.

She is a researcher at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where she works with the Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) program on research related to critical mineral supply chains, industrial development, and the energy transition. Her work spans collaborations with governments, international organizations, and development partners.

As a Watson Fellow, Gretel conducted field research in mining communities across Africa and Asia. She has also collaborated with the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), as well as governments and civil society organizations in Zambia and Malawi, on issues related to critical minerals, industrial policy, and economic transformation.

Alongside her academic work, Gretel writes essays and fiction exploring the human dimensions of extraction, development, and environmental change.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the author are her own and do not in any way reflect those of Paraluman News.