From rivalry to resilience: Geopolitics in the green transition

The world finds itself caught between fragmentation and urgency.

Great power rivalries are reshaping global trade and technology flows. Wars have redrawn energy maps, and carbon-intensive arms racing threatens to reverse hard-won carbon reductions in some regions. A populist backlash against climate policy has gained momentum in the world’s most powerful democracy.

Yet the physical clock of the planet keeps ticking. Floods, fires, and droughts are rewriting the geography of risk faster than diplomacy can adapt.

The paradox is clear: just as cooperation is needed most, the geopolitical system seems least capable of delivering it. But might geopolitics itself – long assumed to be the enemy of sustainability – become part of the solution? Can nations harness rivalry, regionalism, and even self-interest to accelerate, rather than obstruct, an inclusive transition?

This question animated much of the discussion at the Nature and Climate Output Lab, a session convened under the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meetings of the Global Future Councils and Cybersecurity in Dubai. There, leaders from government, business, academia, and civil society explored how the forces now dividing the world might also contain the seeds of convergence.

Their conclusion, implicit or stated, was that the green transition cannot wait for perfect harmony. It must advance through the messy realities of power – not around them.

Two absences hovered over the conversations in Dubai like unacknowledged guests: China and the United States. The silence was striking. No nation has done more than China to scale the technologies of decarbonisation – solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries – or to drive down their cost. Yet no nation emits more carbon, or holds greater sway over the materials that power the transition.

On 9-10 October 2025, Beijing expanded export controls on rare earths and related technologies, adding an extraterritorial licensing rule for foreign products with ≥ 0.1% Chinese-origin rare earth content and tightening controls on magnets, oxides, alloys, production equipment and process know-how. The metals that enable the transition can also be instruments of power.

Across the Pacific, the United States has moved sharply in the opposite direction. The current US government has once again withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and has derided climate change as a “hoax” and renewable energy as a path to ruin.

And yet, rivalry can be a crucible for progress. Competition between the superpowers has already driven an extraordinary acceleration in clean-energy manufacturing. It has catalysed investment in critical minerals, re-shored green industry, and sharpened the focus on resilience and innovation. The challenge now is to prevent “green competition” from devolving into green mercantilism – a zero-sum contest of subsidies, tariffs and technology hoarding.

Geopolitics will not disappear from the climate story. The question is whether it can evolve from a source of paralysis into a source of propulsion: a framework through which self-interest, security, and sustainability finally align.

Just as the old order frays, a new architecture of influence is emerging – one not anchored in any single hegemon but shaped through networks, alliances, and experiments in regional integration. The fragmentation that troubles multilateral institutions also opens space for novel centres of gravity in sustainability.

Across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, coalitions are forming around climate, nature, and development goals. The BRICS collective is increasingly asserting agency over its own transition pathways. ASEAN, ECOWAS, and the African Union are exploring collaborative climate-resilience programs. The Gulf states are engineering large-scale renewable and nature-based projects that straddle energy, water, and ecosystem regeneration. In every region, there’s a push to reimagine sovereignty not as isolation, but as ecological stewardship.

This emergent multipolar momentum has three features worth noting:

The implication is clear: inclusive sustainability can survive or even flourish amid geopolitical fragmentation, as long as new nodes of cooperation are nurtured. The challenge for leaders is to actively catalyze these nodes and ensure that they are equitable, interoperable and committed to planetary boundaries.

No transformation endures without the right incentives. The global economy remains structurally misaligned with the planet’s boundaries – a mismatch of time horizons, metrics, and motivations. Yet shifts are underway that could make sustainability the default logic rather than a costly exception.

First, industrial policy is back, and it is greener than before. From Europe’s Green Deal Industrial Plan and China’s 14th and forthcoming 15th Five-Year Plan, about which Chinese Party leaders will deliberate in the coming weeks, governments are rediscovering that markets alone cannot deliver systemic change. Even the United States, which has long disparaged industrial policy, embraced it during the Biden years – the Inflation Reduction Act contained many green commitments and would have gone far to fund the American energy transition. What distinguishes the current wave is not protectionism per se, but competition for sustainability leadership — who can deploy capital fastest and scale green technologies most efficiently.

Second, finance is evolving from risk management to opportunity design. Sovereign wealth funds, development banks, and private investors are beginning to treat climate resilience and biodiversity as investable assets. The rise of blended finance – combining concessional and commercial capital – is blurring the line between philanthropy and profit. In this model, risk becomes a form of leverage: the willingness of public institutions to take first loss crowds in private capital that would otherwise remain on the sidelines.

Third, measurement is catching up to reality. As carbon markets mature and data transparency improves, firms are being priced – and praised – for long-term value creation rather than short-term earnings. Disclosure standards, such as the ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board), which sets global standards for sustainability-related financial disclosures, are aligning incentives across borders. The challenge now is to extend this logic to nature, water, and waste – to create a full-spectrum accounting of planetary costs.

Finally, digital infrastructure is emerging as the connective tissue of green transformation. Artificial intelligence, satellite monitoring, and blockchain-based traceability systems can verify emissions, track biodiversity credits, and optimize resource use in real time. Properly governed, these technologies make sustainability not just visible, but verifiable.

The question is no longer whether the economics of sustainability work — they do — but whether political will, institutional capacity, and public trust can keep pace. The incentives exist. What remains is alignment.

Every transition ultimately runs on trust. Technology, capital, and policy can accelerate change, but only legitimacy sustains it. The last decade has shown that when people lose confidence in institutions – whether national or global – progress stalls, polarization deepens, and misinformation fills the void.

Rebuilding trust starts with consistency: clear rules applied predictably, commitments honored, and benefits shared. International frameworks must move beyond pledges to predictable execution: disbursements that arrive when promised, standards that are interoperable, and dispute-resolution mechanisms that inspire confidence.

It also demands inclusion. The governance of sustainability cannot remain confined to ministries, corporations, and multilateral bodies. Cities, indigenous communities, youth organizations, and small enterprises are no longer stakeholders on the margins; they are the implementation layer. Their participation makes all the difference when it comes to capacity.

Meanwhile, technology governance has become the new frontier of legitimacy. The same AI systems that accelerate clean-tech discovery can also distort information and entrench inequality. Establishing norms for transparency, safety, and accountability is therefore not ancillary to climate or development agendas: it is vital and central.

Finally, communication matters. The narratives that shape public imagination determine which futures feel possible. A governance model that couples ambition with empathy – one that explains not just what must change, but why and for whom – can bridge divides that treaties alone cannot.

All of these can be challenging in an increasingly fractured geopolitics where national and regional capitals are focused either on great power competition (Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels) or, as for the great majority of the rest, on balancing between those powers, leveraging their competition, hedging or just staying out of the way.

Yet paradoxically, fracture can also fertilize progress. Competition among powers can spur innovation and deployment, as nations race to master green technologies and secure supply chains. Redundant systems – once derided as inefficiencies – can become buffers of resilience, ensuring that no single chokepoint can derail global decarbonization. Regional rivalries may yield diverse policy experiments, each offering lessons that others can adapt. In this sense, fragmentation can distribute risk and generate a kind of ecological pluralism: a world of many pathways converging, however unevenly, toward a shared sustainable horizon.

To be sure, fracture cuts both ways. The same rivalries that drive innovation can just as easily fuel redundancy with no silver lining of added resilience – just undiluted inefficiency. It can fuel zero-sum thinking and hardened ethnonationalist narratives that define security in exclusionary terms. Strategic competition has already diverted resources into carbon-intensive rearmament. Fragmentation risks splintering technology standards, undermining trust, and creating parallel systems that duplicate cost but not progress. The line between resilience and waste is thin, and the world is wobbling on it. The task, then, is not to romanticize multipolarity, but to discipline it: to channel rivalry into races worth winning and to keep inclusion and planetary stability as the metrics that matter.

The next phase of global cooperation will depend less on consensus than on convergence. It will depend on nations, regions, and communities aligning by necessity, even when unity proves elusive. Multipolarity, if governed with discipline and imagination, can still deliver what unipolarity and paralysis could not: distributed resilience, diverse experimentation, and a broader base of legitimacy. The measure of success will not be harmony, but durability – a world able to sustain progress even when politics splinters. That, ultimately, is what resilience must mean.

These insights draw from the expertise and collaboration of expert members of 12 Global Future Councils, including the Councils on Antimicrobial Resistance, Clean Air, Climate and Nature Governance, Data Frontiers, Energy Technology Frontiers, Forest Economy, Good Governance, Innovative Financing for Nature and Climate, Natural Capital, Nature and Security, Regenerative Blue Economy, and Soils