I remember it well because it was my birthday. Adele was saying “Hello”, and topping the charts in the USA, while Justin Bieber was saying “Sorry”, from the top spot in the UK charts.
At the end of COP21 virtually all 195 countries in the world agreed to keep global warming to, ideally 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels.
For a brief moment the world felt aligned.
Nations, that disagreed on almost everything, managed to agree on one thing that mattered to all of us. We must stop the planet from warming, otherwise humanity is done for.
It was a rare moment of global coherence, fragile, imperfect, but real. In hindsight, and given our current level of chaos and division, it seems almost unbelievable.
COP21 was a good COP.
And yet, less than a decade later, we came out of COP30 in Brazil with a very different feeling in the air.
Somewhere along the way, the world’s most important climate forum started to look less like a visionary summit and more like an oil and gas trade show.
The realisation that the dark side was taking hold came into sharp focus in COP 28, held in Dubai. After some ‘exploration and discovery by the mainstream press, it was discovered that the COP President was, astonishingly, Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of UAE’s national oil company.
COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, a major global site for oil production was chaired by Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan's Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources who had worked for over two decades at Azerbaijan's state-owned oil and gas company.
Evidence that COP, the guardian of our galaxy, had turned rogue.
So, what happened?
How did “good COP” become “bad COP” in less than ten years?
The answer is the way we think about climate change is wrong.
We still treat the climate crisis as though it were primarily an engineering challenge, a matter of emissions curves, energy grids, and investment flows.
But climate change is not a technical problem.
It is a multi-dimensional wicked problem with multiple politically charged, emotionally loaded stakeholders, looking at multiple causes and multiple symptoms, trying to agree on multiple constantly evolving solutions.
The answer to climate change isn’t just a matter of rolling out some technical breakthroughs on carbon capture and storage, driving greater uptake of deforestation initiatives and a switch to clean energy. No. Wicked issues can’t be solved by expertise alone. They demand something far rarer: the developmental maturity to hold complexity without collapsing into denial, defensiveness, or short-term gain. And a collaborative capability that humanity has yet to develop.
That maturity and collaborative capability is what’s missing from global climate governance.
When complexity rises, most leaders regress
Under genuine pressure, the human nervous system struggles.
It narrows.
It simplifies.
It reaches for familiar certainties, even when those certainties are precisely what created the problem.
This is not a moral failing; it is a physiological one.
When leaders lack emotional regulation, cognitive sophistication and the ability to think systemically they become overwhelmed by complexity. And overwhelmed leaders default to what they know: commercial interests, political safety, and immediate wins.
Seen through this lens, the fossil fuel industry didn’t “take over” COP.
It simply stepped into the vacuum left by leaders whose developmental capacity was insufficient for the scale of the challenge.
As long as leaders remain at the same level of meaning-making that created the climate crisis, they will continue to trade long-term planetary stability for short-term approval, profit, or geopolitical advantage.
Vertical development: the missing ingredient in climate leadership
This is the new ‘inconvenient truth’ that we must face.
We don’t just need better policies.
We need better leaders, leaders who are developmentally mature enough to integrate multiple timelines, emotionally stable enough to withstand public pressure, and cognitively sophisticated enough to hold global interdependence without fragmentation, polarisation and trivialisation.
Climate governance keeps failing not because the science isn’t clear, but because the leaders interpreting that science are not developmentally equipped to act coherently on it, and work collaboratively to turn away from the dark side of bad COP and rediscover the good COP within.
Until we elevate the maturity of the people around the table, the agreements they produce will continue to decay into political theatre and be driven by vested commercial influence.
The Paris moment was real, but it was temporary. A break in the carbon-laden clouds that let the sun shine through.
Without vertical development, the wisdom we need to overcome such wicked problems cannot be sustained. It buckles under the weight of competing agendas.
And yet, I remain hopeful.
Why?
Because development is possible.
Individuals can grow up. Teams can expand their collective intelligence. Systems can evolve.
But it requires a different kind of leadership journey: one that begins not with carbon accounting, but with the inner architecture of the human being.
If we want a “good COP” again, not as a nostalgic memory, but as a strategic capability, then we need leaders who can access coherence under pressure, integrate competing realities, and act from a level of maturity equal to the complexity of the crisis.
The climate will not wait for us.
But developmentally, we can still catch up, if we choose to.
The real question for COP31 is not whether nations will agree.
It is whether the people at the table have grown enough to make agreement meaningful.