As the old world order breaks down, we need climate action that speaks the language of cost, security and everyday life, writes Dipankar Ghose.
Mark Carney heralding the new world order. The US pulling out of 66 international organisations. A sleeping president arrested in the middle of the night. Greenland and a temper tantrum. Oil at the centre of the world, again. A ceasefire holding only in name. A Board of Peace with a billion-dollar membership fee. And the United Nations could be going bankrupt.
We’ve only had January yet.
It isn’t as if the world hasn’t turned before. In stomach-churning, epoch-defining ways. You don’t have to go very far back in history. The end of the Second World War and the birth of the so-called rules-based order. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The steady ascent of the internet into everyday life. A once-in-a-generation pandemic.
Orders often collapse, reassemble or rename themselves.
And yet this moment, early 2026, feels different. It is different. What has changed is the velocity of change. What existed yesterday cannot be relied upon today. Rules barely matter. Alliances can begin in a heartbeat, and then be quelled in a second heartbeat. Nothing settles long enough to be real.
But even in this sense of disorder, something is becoming clearer. The post-war international order – imperfect, discriminatory, hypocritical, but legible – is teetering on the brink.
When order stops holding
It is important to be clear about one thing: there should be no unqualified paeans to the old order. In the Canadian prime minister’s own words at Davos, those inside it knew the story of the international rules-based system was fiction. The strongest exempted themselves when convenient. Trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. International law was applied with varying standards. Vast swathes of the world have lived the consequence of this order being built on colonialism and plunder; on an economic system that rewarded early industrialisers while lecturing others on restraint. Without ever really thinking about how that early industrialisation was made possible, or the divisions it left behind in the societies it exploited.
And yet, over time, that order came to become every-day. At the very least, it offered a measure of predictability. There was a sense of sequence. Of how the world worked and some learned to navigate within it. There was a façade of cooperation, of internationalism. There was space for issues that spilled across borders: water, climate, energy transition, hunger, the Global South. Imperfect as it was, you could plan within it. You could assume it would still be there tomorrow.
So what does the unravelling of that order mean for the environment, and for the Global South?
Everything.
Because while the great renegotiation is on, it is already clear who is driving the process. Power remains concentrated among those with the strongest militaries, the largest economies, or the leaders in artificial intelligence. Everyone else is fair game, reduced to sum totals of their most valuable resources and defined by two key questions: What do you have? And what can you supply?
Anxiety as politics
When leaders begin to view nations this way, living places turn into disembodied assets. Venezuela becomes oil, or Maduro, or María Corina Machado, not 30 million living, breathing human beings who laugh, love and negotiate life every day. Greenland becomes Denmark, or Trump, or a threat imagined from Putin or Xi, not 57,000 people whose lives hang in the balance of the capricious jousting playing out before the world. What disappears is the fact that it is people who work, fall ill, migrate, protest, and vote. It is people who form the most important pressure group there is. It is people who constitute political will.
What is also clear is that the growing transactionalism of the world feeds directly into personal anxiety. It becomes harder to care about the environment when tariffs imposed elsewhere, by forces beyond your control, threaten to shut down your business or decide whether there is food on the table. This has long been a field of research, and social scientists describe it as a “finite pool of worry”. When anxiety is high, driven by political instability, economic uncertainty, violence, or a sense that the social order itself is fragile, attention shifts toward threats that feel immediate and experiential. Environmental change, by contrast, is often perceived as distant and probabilistic. This does not mean people stop believing the science. It means concern is deferred, indefinitely, in favour of short-term security.
What does this mean for those who believe in, and care about, climate change?
The data is clearer than ever. The impacts are no longer theoretical. But appeals to shared sacrifice travel poorly in a world preoccupied with its own security. As Carney put it in Davos, we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Pretending that goodwill and cooperation will persuade people whose lives already feel brittle seems like a fool’s errand.
The urgent reframing
What follows, then, is an urgent, if uncomfortable, reframing of the climate debate. Not as virtue, but as consequence. There are real, immediate costs to environmental breakdown. Rising heat means workers cannot build the futures we keep imagining. The slow sinking of island nations is not only a profound moral catastrophe but one of the most predictable drivers of migration in the decades ahead. Floods turn infrastructure into a recurring reconstruction bill. Pollution fills children’s lungs and public hospitals in countries already short on resources. For governments, for businesses, and even for journalism, it is fashionable to talk about getting ahead of the curve on artificial intelligence. It is equally urgent to get ahead of the curve on climate change.
Any serious strategy must do the same thing: the worst-case scenario must be brought to people. What happens if we do nothing? Pollution may not be on your relative’s post-mortem report, but it is killing your children now, and it will kill their children after them. It brings down productivity, forces people to leave home, and brings instability and war. As a January UK government report noted, global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse affect national security: they disrupt food, water, health and supply chains, and trigger geopolitical instability. They threaten ways of life.
Of course, this is not new. These arguments have always existed, and they surface every time there is a flood, a heatwave, a crop failure, even a war. The problem is that those frames make an appearance, and then they are forgotten by the mainstream. Climate is still spoken about as a parallel crisis, adjacent to questions of jobs, stability, trade or security, instead of as the condition shaping all of them. That must change. Governments of small states negotiating trade deals, international institutions setting priorities, newsrooms picking stories and headlines, and communities struggling to be heard all need to speak of the environmental breakdown in language this moment demands.
Seen and forced into policy this way, heat action plans are not just climate policy; they are public safety policy. Water security is not just environmentalism; it is urban stability. Flood and drought planning is not just green policy; it is state capacity restoration. Energy diversification is not just climate virtue; it is economic survival beyond oil.
When climate is understood in these terms, it re-enters politics differently. Not just as virtue, but as something more valuable: pressure. Voting blocs form around price, safety, survival and quality of life. Governments will move not because they have seen the light, but because they are forced to. Climate action becomes legible in a balkanised world.
This is why the reframing matters. Because the old language no longer works. In a world crowded with denialists, opportunists and strongmen, climate politics cannot afford to sound detached from lived reality. It must refuse the cast of moral theatre, or lifestyle preference, or the preserve of people insulated from consequence. This is not about singing songs of hope. This is about keeping the lights on, food affordable, cities habitable, borders stable. It is about survival – not survival in some abstract, put-off-for-later universal sense, but survival now: migration, heat, the ability to breathe. Now.
And it matters just as much for whatever comes next in global politics. The new world order, if that is what we are entering, is being assembled in real time through tariffs, deals, security doctrines and raw power. But climate change is not a side issue that can be deferred until the dust settles. It is already reshaping economies, migration, conflict and state capacity. Any order that fails to reckon with that will not be durable. It will fracture under the weight of heat, scarcity and instability, just as others have fractured before it.
Mark Carney is right that nostalgia is not a strategy. But neither is denial. Climate action that speaks the language of cost, security and everyday life still has a place. Climate action that does not, will find itself sidelined. Quietly at first, and then completely. And any order that chooses that path will not last very long.
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