Behind the 'bribe, bully, buy' tactics of developed countries, with veteran climate negotiator Dr Gary Theseira

“What’s going on there (in Paris)?”, Theseira recalls Najib asking his boss Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, who was at the time the minister for natural resources and environment in Malaysia. “Why are all the developed countries sore at Malaysia?”

Malaysia was in the hot seat because Theseira, then the ministry’s undersecretary for climate change, had been the lead coordinator of the G77 and China, a coalition of developing countries, and was defending the bloc’s position. The next day, when the legally binding international treaty to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius was adopted by consensus, Malaysia would receive a standing ovation from all 134 member countries of the G77 and China coalition; but the negotiations leading up to the final talks have been testy, said Theseira.

In this interview with Eco-Business, Theseira shared observations of behind-the-scene dynamics at critical moments of COP negotiations and highlighted how the United States and other developed countries would often affect the agenda with their key maneuvers and tactics. It would have helped if he thought to “keep an ace up his sleeve” at times, by forming stronger coalitions and prempting the moves, he shared.

Appointed in January this year to lead Climate Governance Malaysia as its council chair, Theseira is also reflective of the moment, with the US having re-elected Donald Trump as president, and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement for the second time. 

“My own experience is that, unfortunately, the US has been front and centre every time [a delay to the climate agenda] has happened,” said the veteran climate negotiator, who has represented Malaysia at 14 United Nations COPs. He stressed that political leaders need to be educated on climate and sustainability, or surround themselves with experts, and not just “billionaires” – making a dig at Trump who has been flanked by some of the world’s wealthiest people since he took the oath of office on January 20. 

Theseira is also currently teaching sustainability and climate risk management at the Asia School of Business as an adjunct associate professor. In this interview, he describes his career journey, and highlights how company boards can build capacity to better prepare for decision-making on climate and sustainability issues. Corporate leaders need to understand what is at stake, he said. 

Why did you choose a career in sustainability?

My first degree was in agriculture in the US [at Southern Illinois University], studying primarily about food crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and barley. I chose agriculture because I thought that if there is something everyone in the world needs, it is food.

When I finished my bachelor’s degree, Dr Chong She-Kong, a professor at the university who is from Malaysia, asked me: “Why don’t you do a master’s degree in soil physics? If you want to grow things, you need water and soil.” So I did my master’s degree under him.

Then I was told that if I wanted to do a PhD, there were people in Mississippi who were working with the US Department of Agriculture which was giving out grants to do computer simulations of cropping systems. I thought that was great, because we were just entering the era of the first desktop machines.

So I did my PhD on modelling cotton – that was the first non-food crop I studied. But that study took longer than expected because it was a drought study, and the five years I spent in Mississippi were the rainiest ever. In the fourth year, they suggested I go to a research station in Corpus Christi, Texas, where I was guaranteed a drought. But once I’d set up all my equipment in the field, we got a hurricane instead! I was told to run with the data I had.

Then I was asked if I wanted to run this computerised model on cottonwood trees, which I did as a postdoctoral assistantship between 1990 and 1996. It was the first study I did that looked at the effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) on trees – they fed CO2 into the air around these trees and studied how they responded.

It was very interesting because although the trees did respond positively to higher CO2, as they became more stimulated they also absorbed more ozone precursors, which are cell-damaging substances. [Note: ozone precursors are gasses such as nitrogen oxides that cause air pollution, respiratory problems and crop damage via acid rain.]

We were working in upper Michigan and the prevailing wind came from the southern Great Lakes, Gary, Chicago and Detroit [areas which were major manufacturing hubs and are part of the US “Rust Belt”]. All those chemicals were moving up and were being absorbed by all the trees. So as the trees attempted to accelerate their growth with CO2, they were also burning themselves with all these ozone precursors.

In a way, it’s not surprising that later on, I found myself working with both the greenhouse gas convention [formally the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)] and the Montreal Convention on Ozone Depleting Substances.

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What the developed countries spend a lot of time on is to – I call it the three Bs – bribe, bully or buy out (developing countries). 

What were your reasons for returning to Malaysia?

Partially, it was because my US visa required me to leave the country for a year. But that coincided with an economic downturn that dried up all the research funding.

I actually wanted to replicate the modelling that I did in the US in Malaysia, but it was ahead of its time – there was no money and interest at the industry level. So I got into quantifying forest carbon. I didn’t need a computer for that, it was straightforward calculation.

I worked with very good scientists at the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM) who pioneered whole-of-tree sampling methods – that means, measuring the carbon content of the entire tree, including counting the leaves.

To understand how much carbon there is in a tree, you need all parts of it – and different species are different in terms of their branching structures and the amount of biomass they have in the form of leaves, twigs, branks, trunks, roots.

The only way you can really tell what the carbon content of a whole tree is would be to literally harvest the whole tree. You have to extract the tree from the ground. You don’t have to do it all in one piece but you do have to collect and measure everything, including every leaf that drops off.

When we published our data, we were able to help other countries. There was a grant-giving agency in Korea that wanted us to share this information as part of Korea’s aid package to Myanmar, for us to go and teach university students there how to do this. So we went to Naypyidaw with some equipment and lots of currency – we changed US dollars into bags and bags of local currency – and went in a van from Yangon up to Naypyidaw.

What I learnt (from that experience) was that in a country where there is nothing to own, there is no reason to steal money. There was nothing to buy. The highway to Naypyidaw was deserted; we were the only vehicle for hours. And when we got to the university, people were paid so poorly that they only worked until two in the afternoon because they needed the rest of the day to plant food to eat.

It was my first experience of what life is like in other parts of the world. It was very eye-opening. That underscored what mismanagement of natural resources can do – in Myanmar’s case, it was the succession of military regimes and infighting.

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The wise among us would do well to read the room more carefully and not give in to the bullies.

What was a career highlight?

I was doing a lot of work on carbon quantification for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in Malaysia and ended up being seconded to the ministry in 2010. At the time, it was headed by Douglas Uggah Embas, who is now a deputy premier of Sarawak. His faith in me allowed me to very quickly build rapport with international climate negotiators.

Malaysia has had an “up and down” role in the international realm of climate science. For example, when we were crafting the 1992 UN Convention on Climate Change [formally known as the UNFCCC] at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Malaysian diplomats were at the front and centre of negotiations. During the early years of the negotiations between 2001 to 2010, we had people from the Department of Meteorology who were very active, such as the late Chow Kok Kee, then-chair of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA). People like that were putting Malaysia on the map.

So when we began negotiating the Paris Agreement in 2012, the late Dr Martin Khor [who was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Task Force on Environment and Human Settlements, and executive director of South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries] spoke at one of the intersectionals in Bangkok to a group that would later become the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC). He managed to convince them that it would be good for me to help them and he got the G77 and China to agree that Malaysia should be the lead coordinator for its work leading up to the Paris Agreement.

To me, it was an almost unimaginable task. Essentially, I was coordinating all the thematic coordinators for each of the agenda items for the Paris Agreement. That meant that Malaysia would essentially be the entity that the developed world would deal with as the representative of 134 countries.

As you might expect, negotiations for the Paris Agreement were very tough. By that time we were in Paris, Malaysia’s Ministry of Natural Resource and Environment had been through two ministers, so the minister who was with us in Paris was Junaidi, who is now the Yang di-Pertua (Governor) of Sarawak.

There was unimaginable pressure. The US State Department found my number; they were calling me from Washington DC. They were trying to call then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in Kuala Lumpur in the middle of the night. Najib called Junaidi and asked: “What’s going on? Why are all the developed countries sore at Malaysia?”

The person I admire most in all of this was Junaidi, because when he came in [as minister] in early 2015, there was an entire change of my upline at the ministry. The (newcomers) were completely unprepared for the stakes that we were carrying for the developing world.

The only person who rose to the occasion was Junaidi. He was very calm and in the middle of the night, said to Prime Minister Najib, “I’ll get a briefing from Gary in the morning and I’ll handle it.”

By that time, (the Paris Agreement) was a done deal. The developed countries had acceded to a particular draft of the Paris Agreement and we were done.

(What happened next) was very touching. After I finished dealing with that night’s crisis – all that was left for me to do was brief Junaidi in the morning before the final plenary – I remember walking back to the G77 plenary hall. And when I entered the hall, Malaysia received a standing ovation from the 134 countries of the G77 and China group for helping to guide and coordinate the work to this end.

To me, there is nothing that can replace the gratitude, appreciation and recognition of countries for Malaysia’s contributions. It is not about me, but about Malaysia’s contribution to helping the developing world negotiate this very painful process.

When I briefed the minister the next morning, I think he realised what Malaysia had achieved was phenomenal. Two years later, when he was explaining in Parliament why Malaysia had been selected to chair one of the committees of the Convention on Biological Diversity, he said it was because Malaysia gives the developing world confidence.

Junaidi was statesman-like in his approach, he remained cool. This was despite how we were being hassled by the developed countries in the negotiations. He met and spoke with (then-US secretary of state) John Kerry and he communicated Malaysia’s stance, that it had the trust and approval of the G77 and China to represent the group, and was only doing so.

Malaysian Energy and Environment Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar (left) and United States Secretary of State John Kerry (right) shaking hands at a bilateral meeting on 10 December, 2015, at the LeBourget Airport in Paris, France. The meeting happened on the sidelines of the COP21 climate change conference. Image: US Department of State/ Wikimedia Commons

What was that negotiation process like?

In negotiations, the developed world aims to divide and conquer. Any time a group has consensus, they have power.

So the G77 and China, being essentially all the developing countries in the world, have a very difficult time achieving consensus because the Least Developed Countries group is there, the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) (are there)…and the SIDS are divided into Caribbean small islands and Pacific small islands. They don’t always see eye to eye. The Arab countries are there, the Africa Group is there.

All it takes is for one group to disagree with any of the values, and the G77 loses a consensus position. So what the developed countries spend a lot of time on is to – I call it the three Bs – bribe, bully or buy out (developing countries).

Things like this have happened before in Copenhagen (in 2009, at COP15), where we had developed countries threatening that developing countries would lose their aid if they didn’t support the proposals put forth by developed countries.

You need to understand how dire the position of some of these countries are. They survive – not prosper but survive – on aid from Europe. We have had some countries coming to us and representatives literally crying [from the fear of losing aid.]

So for me, the most important thing for the G77 and China to do is to build internal consensus. At the preceding COP in Peru (in 2014), the developed countries pushed the G77 and China so hard, they actually ended up pushing us altogether. From Peru to Paris, my job was to ensure that this fragile consensus could last until the gavel dropped on the final document.

Nobody listens to lone countries; decisions have been gavelled through many times (despite individual protests). I had that experience at COP17 in Durban, South Africa where I held out against one of the initiatives being shelved – Malaysia was the only country trying to support that. 

A group picture of the Like-minded Developing Countries on Climate Change (LMDC) after the COP21 negotiations in Paris, 2015. Dr Gary Theseira (front row, second from left) who coordinated negotiations for the G77 and China coalition, described his colleagues as the “finest and most dedicated developing country negotiators in the world”. Image: Gary Theseira

(We had seen a similar incident happen) in Cancun, at COP16 in 2010. It was a year following the Copenhagen summit, when the developed countries, led by the US, came up with the US$100 billion (annual finance mobilisation goal to support climate action in developing countries by 2020) because they wanted to build trust in the multilateral process. Then, Bolivia said no, you can’t buy us with US$100 billion, but that argument was not accepted.

The difference between (what happened at) Cancun and Durban was in Durban, Malaysia had been gavelled down by a fellow developing country, the South African COP presidency. It was at this COP that we realised the importance of having a fallback position if or when the G77 and China were divided and turned against each other in the chaos during the endgame of negotiations.

Interestingly, LMDC was formed for similar reasons too. Martin Khor grouped about 30 countries so that there would be a fallback in the closing hours of the negotiation, when the pressure on developing countries grows and it becomes almost impossible to forge a consensus, especially when small, vulnerable and poor countries are bullied, bribed or bought over.

Throughout the process of negotiating for the Paris treaty, the G77 and China was always supported by LMDC. When the G77 and China needed coordinators for a particular negotiation theme, the group would provide one. They would ensure that LMDC would have the closest possible position to the G77 and China, so that even if the larger coalition position was lost, the negotiators could whole-heartedly fight for the LMDC position.

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The deals are all made in the hallways after the meetings, outside the official room. You come into a room and  you are going through the motions and then suddenly you realise, oh, there is a consensus (already) and you are not part of it.

It’s also been about 10 years since the Paris Agreement – do you think things have changed since then?

I think despite the best efforts of good faith negotiations, there will always be entities for which expecting a negotiation in good faith is simply too much to ask. You can say everything is down to the wire but just before the gavel drops, a flag will go up and somebody will once again try to squeeze something else out of the document that everyone has gone over hundreds of times, word by word, and that has been agreed to. 

The lesson I’ve learned is that the US has been front and centre every single time it’s happened. At the closing plenary before we adopted the Paris Agreement, the US dropped a bombshell to delay the proceedings: it said that there was a word in the text that read “shall” when it should read “should”. If you want to talk about fairness and equity, there are times when it just goes out the window and might makes right. It happened then and it’s happening now. [Editor’s note: The misplaced word brought the momentum toward the historic deal to a halt for a few hours, with supporters of the deal fearful that re-opening the text would lead to revisions from other countries, possibly swamping the effort.]

In some ways, our human foibles [will surface]. It’s sad that the most powerful nation in the world that has some of the best minds and has created some of the most amazing inventions, with scientists that have made some of the most profound discoveries, still feels the need to exact a toll on the global society. It’s like a child who is holding up the game in a schoolyard.

So if you ask me about what has changed and what hasn’t, and what’s been bad and tough, unfortunately, human society has not failed to disappoint at key junctures.

But for every one of these disappointments, there is also a Michael Bloomberg who steps up and says: “America is not going to pay our dues to the UN? I’ll pay them.” Or there are states or governors that say that they will still support the Paris Agreement and invest in green. [Note: Former New York Mayor Bloomberg pledged in January this year to give US$22 million to the UN’s climate budget.] 

It’s interesting we started out talking about science and now we are delving into politics. How should politics and climate interact?

There will always be leaders in the world who will take the trouble to inform themselves [about climate issues], so they know first hand. Then there are leaders who may not, but they surround themselves with good people whose advice they take.

But unfortunately, there are leaders in the world who surround themselves with billionaires, so the advice they receive is off the mark. And then there are leaders who, regardless of who they surround themselves with, are still going to say what’s on their mind.

The question is: what will help humanity choose the leaders it needs? Education is what matters, which is why I’ve found my way back to university after retirement and why I’m in the business of building capacity at the board level to understand climate and sustainability, so that when the C-suite leaders ask them for sustainability allocations, the board understands what’s at stake.

If we don’t understand these, then we would be doing what US President Donald Trump is doing: announcing tariffs, realising that his own country’s supply chains (would be affected) yet still rolling sustainability measures back. If Malaysia did something like that, nobody would invest their money here.

Malaysia’s lead negotiator for the COP20 climate summit Gurdial Singh Nijar (left) and Dr Gary Theseira (right), then-undersecretary for climate change in Malaysia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Envrionment, in Lima, Peru, in 2015. Image: Power Shift Malaysia/ YouTube

Is there anything you would have done differently?

That’s a tricky one. I guess the thing I might do differently is to become more of a student of human behaviour.

You can spend so much time trying to understand the natural world and build your career on disciplines that rely on evidence, facts and data.

But you find out the moment you work for a very astute minister that when dealing with people, a lot of that is superficial. Everything that a person says, or most of the things that a person says, are all intended to craft your perception (of them). Their true objective is (hidden) several layers down.

There are people in the world that are just…so astute, who have you evaluated and assessed from the very start, who have you sussed out. They immediately know which buttons to press, and they also know which buttons they shouldn’t press yet.

When you are a scientist and you rely on all of these evidence, it pains me to think that you could be so easily manipulated by someone who really understands (human behaviour).

This (skill of being able to read people) would have been very useful in (climate) negotiations. For example, I would have kept a card up my sleeve in Paris – yes, I would have been cheering with everyone else, but I would have tried to hold on to an ace, and get a number of very powerful developing countries (on my side). Then when the US puts down its (objections), we could have pulled out that ace card and got more support (around the treaty). 

The deals are all made in the hallways after the meetings, outside the official room. You come into a room and you’re going through the motions and then suddenly you realise, oh, there is a consensus (already) and you are not part of it. It’s too much to ask for everyone to negotiate in good faith. The wise among us would do well to read the room more carefully and not give in to the bullies.

How do you stay on top of such negotiations then?

You form good coalitions. Developed countries have strategists and lawyers on their delegations. Developing countries are (mostly represented by) civil servants, so we are forced to share resources, intelligence and data.

You can’t go to the negotiations and expect a nine-to-five job. You are meeting other delegates in the bars after hours, meeting them over falafel – you are talking shop all the time.

Twenty minutes before the next meeting, you could be in a huddle. You get a strong (consensus on the) position and that’s what goes into (the minutes of the official meeting). 

Dr Gary Theseira (in blue) conducting a consensus-building session at COP18 in Doha, Qatar, in 2012. He had been chosen to coordinate developing country negotiations under the G77 and China bloc. Image: Gary Theseira

What advice would you give to younger people who are interested in getting into climate as a career?

One of the things we hear about now is eco-anxiety. My advice is: don’t waste your efforts on being anxious. Worry is wasted energy.

The current world that young people live in is nothing like the world that we grew up in. All we had was Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf. Now, practically all (access to) information has been democratised. Want to understand quantum physics? You can listen to a Harvard lecture on it.

One of the things you can do now that you couldn’t possibly do before is to stay informed on all the things that you want to change. If you are passionate about transport, information is out there about everything, from (things that are) so aspirational it’s absurd, to real world things that actually work.

Decide what you are interested in. Forget even about regular school – that’s something people are really thinking about. Scandinavian countries have already dispensed with the idea of formal schooling – they are saying start with play, then it’s all about guidance, and assessment of interest and potential.

The Internet is your textbook and you can use intelligent search. Ask an artificial intelligence (chatbot) to craft your entire education schedule, and adjust, amend and enrich it so that your questions will be addressed. 

You need to work backwards from where you want your career to be. For example, I recently asked Deepseek to list all the scientific disciplines that were associated with sustainability. Then I asked for a second list of disciplines that were related to and supported the first list. Then I asked, what kind of a core curriculum would you propose? What would prepare a person for this career?

Don’t worry about the loss of jobs due to AI – there will always be a gap in information. The world will be your classroom, and the Internet your textbook. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.