The world's nations keep faltering in their efforts to unite to save the planet from environmental crises.
In the past few months United Nations-sponsored negotiations to tackle climate change, plastic pollution, loss of global species and a growing number of deserts either outright failed or came out with limited outcomes.
It's been three years since activist Greta Thunberg dismissed global talks as "blah-blah-blah," which became a rallying cry for young environmentalists.
More than 20 experts called multilateral environmentalism broken because of a cumbersome consensus process, the power of the fossil fuel industry, geopolitical changes and the massive size of the problems to fix.
Progress is being made, but it's too little, too slow and in stutter steps, U.N. officials and others said.
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"Is it frustrating? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes," U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said. But it is the "only way" in which smaller and poorer nations get a seat at the table with powerful rich countries, she said. "I wouldn't classify it as an outright failure."
Failed conferences
In 1987, the world adopted a treaty reversing loss of stratospheric ozone by banning certain chemicals. Then, a 1992 Earth summit set up a U.N. system for negotiating environmental problems called Conference of Parties, or COPs.
Recently, these meetings fell relatively flat.
The biodiversity COP in Cali, Colombia, in October ran out of time, ending with no big agreement except to recognize Indigenous people's efforts.
November's climate change COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, on paper reached its key goal of increasing financing for poor nations to cope with climate change, but developing nations and analysts said it wasn't nearly enough. A plastics pollution meeting in Busan, South Korea, the next week got many nations saying they wanted to do something, but didn't in the end.
The conference on desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, also failed to reach an agreement on how to deal with drought.
Nine years ago, when more than 190 nations came together to adopt the historic Paris agreement, countries had a mindset that realized a healthy planet benefited everyone, but "we've lost track of that," said former U.N. climate secretary Christiana Figueres, who shepherded that deal. "We're now entering as though we were gladiators in the Colosseum with an attitude of fighting and confrontation. And that mindset is not very productive."
'Lost our way'
Panama lead negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey was part of all four meetings and said the entire system is "fundamentally broken."
"It feels like we have lost our way, not only as countries and governments, but as humanity. It feels like we no longer care for each other," Monterrey said in Riyadh.
He said he thinks countries like his will have to fight environmental problems on their own or with small groups of nations.
"We need to find alternative pathways," said Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty, pointing to a climate case before the International Court of Justice.
Figueres said one group of lawyers filed 140 climate change-oriented legal actions in courts around the world. Nations and businesses -- and the economy in general -- are doing much more at home to fight climate change regardless of COPs, she said.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said: "We can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
Shift to consensus
Thirty years ago, there was debate over how decisions should be adopted.
A prominent fossil fuel industry lobbyist and Saudi Arabia pushed hard to kill the idea of majority or supermajority vote and shift to consensus so that every country more or less had to be on board, said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge at Cambridge University in England.
"Through that they managed to stymie, to weaken the negotiations," Depledge said.
The nature of consensus is "we end up moving at the pace of the slowest," PowerShift Africa's Mohamed Adow said.
Gore, Depledge and others advocate for new rules to make COP decisions by supermajority rule, not consensus, but past efforts failed.
"Multilateralism isn't dead, but it is being held hostage by a very small number of countries trying to prevent progress," Gore said. "There's no greater example of this than the way that the fossil fuel industry has hijacked policymaking at all levels."
For 27 years, climate negotiation agreements never mentioned "fossil fuels" as the cause of climate change, nor called for their elimination. After fights last year in Dubai, it called for a transition away from fossil fuels.
All the experts said they still have hope.
"To be hopeless is to give up on the lives of people today," climate activist Mitzi Jonelle Tan said. "To be hopeless is to give up on my family, on our experiences here. To give up is to give up life."
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