Gerard Toal’s excellent book, Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe, and mine, Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage, offer complementary accounts of the failure of global climate governance. The books share some theoretical touchstones, for example, the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and an interest in a vitalist politics that is alive to the force of the non-human.

I thank Toal for raising two important issues for discussion. The first concerns whether global governance today is fit for purpose when it comes to addressing climate change. He notes that one way of reading Governing the End is “as a portrait of the sharp inadequacies of the existing structures of global governance to address a planetary problem like climate change.” Defenders of the status quo would argue that the current model of multilateralism has gotten us further in reducing levels of warming than we would be without it or that the very process of more than 195 states coming together and reaching agreements is a victory. Others point to progress that is being made in the development and scaling of new technologies. Reformers are increasingly looking outside the existing UNFCCC structures for solutions: in 2025, the Brazilians floated the idea of a new United Nations Climate Council, to be established by a UN General Assembly resolution, to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement. Others argue, as Toal points out, for new planetary-level governance institutions.

Toal is right that, having situated myself at the heart of the slow-moving climate change diplomatic machinery, I find it hard to imagine a “revolutionary break” from existing governance structures and practices. The kinds of changes that are needed would include fundamental shifts in how we understand national interests, the emergence of a collective understanding of the environment’s intrinsic value, the widespread establishment of an economic model that moves beyond extractive logics, and the redesign and delivery of global governance systems that effectively channel the voices of those who are most vulnerable to climate change. Technological developments and governance innovations offer some hope, but whether they can be delivered at pace and at scale is a looming question.

Second, Toal raises the broader geopolitical shifts over the last decade. Oceans Rise Empires Fall does a wonderful job tracking these geopolitical shifts and the ways in which climate change is imbricated in these dynamics. Toal is correct that geopolitics is not foregrounded in my book: when it manifests, it does so subtly through the interventions and practices that I was able to capture through the ethnographic sensibility I deployed in the rooms I was in. Toal also points to the significant role of China’s leadership in the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy. China is notably absent from my account, mainly because they were largely absent or silent on the loss and damage issue. I argue more broadly that the silences in these rooms are a worthy object of analytical enquiry in and of themselves. Toal is right to suggest that the ecological civilization ambition of China may be one of the bright spots in the domain of climate change politics, but China’s most recent 5-year plan, announced in March 2026, still has coal-powered energy as a driver. While China is a leader in green energy, it also continues to pursue a model of growth that will contribute to loss and damage across the world. My book shows that climate change politics has broadened significantly beyond the politics of mitigation and clean energy and that true leadership is attentive to the full spectrum of climate action, from mitigation to addressing the losses that climate change engenders.