Last year, while working on a water and sanitation project in a community that had already started rationing its dry-season supply, I remember a local elder telling me, almost matter-of-factly, that the rains didn’t come the way they used to. He wasn’t talking about climate models or emissions targets.
He was talking about a well running low. That conversation has stayed with me every time I read another headline announcing that the world has breached the 1.5°C threshold, as if a switch has been flipped and the project of climate governance is now, by default, a failure.
It isn’t. The physical climate has crossed a line we spent decades trying not to cross. But the assumption that this breach discredits the institutions built to manage it gets the causality backwards. The Paris Agreement was never designed to be a wall that either holds or shatters. It was designed to be something closer to scaffolding, a framework flexible enough to be rebuilt around as conditions change.
The shift toward an “overshoot and decline” strategy, in which the world accepts a temporary breach and works to bring temperatures back down over time, is not evidence that global governance has collapsed under pressure. It is evidence that it hasn’t.
Why nobody can actually walk away
There’s a concept in international relations called complex interdependence, and it explains something that pure self-interest calculations often miss: no state exists in isolation anymore, not economically, not ecologically, not in terms of the food and water systems that hold societies together.
When El Niño disrupts crop yields in one region, the shock doesn’t stay local; it moves through trade networks, through commodity prices, through the migration pressures that follow scarcity. When sea levels rise in a low-lying delta, the displacement that follows becomes someone else’s border question within a generation.
This is the part that gets lost in the “world is giving up” narrative. Giving up isn’t actually available as an option, not in any way that spares the state that tries it. A country that disengages from climate cooperation doesn’t insulate itself from climate consequences; it just insulates itself from having a say in how those consequences are managed.
That asymmetry, between the cost of participating and the cost of not participating, is precisely why rational state behavior keeps trending toward more cooperation rather than less, even in a moment that looks, on the surface, like retreat.
The Paris Agreement was built to bend
This is where the idea of an international regime matters. Regimes aren’t rigid contracts with pass-or-fail conditions. They’re the accumulated norms, rules, and expectations that let actors coordinate without renegotiating everything from scratch every time circumstances shift.
The Paris Agreement’s real achievement was never locking in a specific temperature outcome; it was creating a standing platform, backed by the UN, where new instruments (carbon-removal tracking, revised national targets, updated monitoring mechanisms) can be introduced without having to rebuild an entire global coalition from zero.
Judged against that standard, the overshoot isn’t a broken promise. It’s the treaty doing what a living framework is supposed to do: absorbing a shock and adjusting its tools, rather than requiring everyone to walk away and start over.
What the US withdrawal actually proves
Realists point to moments like a major power stepping back from an accord as proof that international law is toothless the moment a powerful state decides it’s inconvenient. It’s a fair challenge, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.
The answer is that the norms embedded in the Paris framework didn’t require Washington’s continued participation to keep functioning. State governments, corporations, and NGOs inside the withdrawing country kept operating under the treaty’s logic anyway, and the remaining coalition of nations didn’t dissolve their commitments just because one seat emptied.
That persistence is the more interesting data point. It suggests the institution’s authority was never fully hostage to any single government’s preferences in the first place. A framework that survives the exit of one of its most powerful members, still functioning, still setting the terms other actors organize around, is not a fragile one.
What comes next
None of this is a case for complacency. Overshoot carries real costs; ecosystems and communities, like the one I saw rationing water, don’t get to wait for the temperature to come back down before they feel the effects. But the lesson of this moment isn’t that institutions have failed and should be abandoned.
It’s closer to the opposite: the strain the system is under is exactly the argument for reinforcing it, not walking away from it.
That means more international legal instruments, not fewer; stricter, more transparent monitoring regimes; and functioning global carbon markets that make the cost of emissions visible across borders instead of hidden inside them. The overshoot era doesn’t call for less global governance.
It calls for governance that has finally been tested, and now knows where it needs to get stronger.
Author is a student (third year) at Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University. She can be reached at [email protected]
