【Speaker】：Prof. D'Maris Coffman (University College London)

【Title】：Climate Governance and Regional Development after the SDGs

【Time】：10:15am, April 25, 2026.

【Location】：Beijing Lab for System Engineering of Carbon Neutrality

【About Report】：As shifting geopolitical and economic realities expose the limits of the Sustainable Development Goals as a unifying framework, multilateral cooperation is fragmenting into regional and sectoral alliances. The recent Iran war has accelerated this trend, underscoring the vulnerability of global energy systems, the fragility of trade routes, and the limits of universal governance models under conditions of heightened uncertainty. This talk examines how regional development pacts across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific are replacing universal institutions with more adaptive forms of cooperation. These frameworks mark a shift from doctrinal to functional multilateralism, coordinated through flexible coalitions linking governments with investors, planners, and researchers in universities and consultancies that provide technical advice and policy support.

The Iran conflict has brought energy security back to the centre of climate governance. Disruptions to Gulf shipping lanes, heightened risk premia in oil and LNG markets, and renewed attention to chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz have reinforced the primacy of regional energy resilience over global optimisation. In this context, regional pacts are increasingly shaped by hard constraints: energy interdependence, food security, water scarcity, and climate adaptation, rather than the more abstract industrial strategies or urban agendas that characterised the SDG era. Their success depends on how well they manage shared vulnerabilities: critical-mineral supply chains, grid interconnection, sustainable agriculture, and water governance under conditions of geopolitical stress. The African Union’s regional power pools and the African Continental Free Trade Area remain instructive models for cooperation, but are now complemented by more explicitly stability-oriented frameworks that integrate energy, logistics, and infrastructure resilience.

For Europe and its external partners, this shift is visible in a more pragmatic approach to cross-regional engagement. Cooperation with China, the Gulf states, and Indo-Pacific economies is increasingly mediated through infrastructure investment, energy corridors, and strategic supply chains rather than through purely normative alignment. The intersection of the EU–China Connectivity Platform with broader Indo-Pacific and African initiatives illustrates this recalibration.

Post-SDG multilateralism is therefore less a universal system than a web of overlapping regional compacts. These use energy transitions not only as vehicles for decarbonisation, but as instruments of energy security and systemic resilience. They are underwritten by regional finance, sovereign risk-sharing, and emerging data-governance regimes, with cybersecurity and artificial intelligence becoming integral to infrastructure systems. The Iran war did not create this new order, but it has sharpened it. What is emerging is a form of multilateralism that is narrower, more transactional, and more explicitly conditioned by system stability, yet potentially more capable of delivery in a fragmented world.