You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with climate change, but as I listened last month to historian James Graham Wilson talk about the “triumph of improvisation” that ended the nearly 50-year stare-down between the United States and the U.S.S.R., I was struck by the parallels. The idea of individual leaders escaping the momentum of conventional approaches and adapting on the fly to solve a major global issue deeply resonated with me. It’s exactly what international climate change negotiations desperately need.

Creative improvising means leadership not hemmed in by the past; leadership that considers many different pathways, venues, and agreement configurations to get to the end goal. For humanity, as the stranglehold of greenhouse gas emissions tightens, it is time to decide whether it is more important to sign a piece of paper or have a real impact on global warming.

Follow the Lead of Weapons Treaties

Scientists tell us the situation is stark and governments must do more to reverse the rapid heating caused by unrestrained release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Inaction has forced us into a critical situation. “We cannot afford to lose another decade,” Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who co-chaired the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told The New York Times. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.” A melted Greenland ice sheet, for example, cannot be reconstructed, at any price.

We know there are serious challenges of political will – put plainly, governments not stepping up to take responsibility. But the model for addressing climate change is also faulty. Doggedly sticking to the idea of resolving, in one grand bargain, every one of the hugely complex issues that together result in, or are a consequence of, climate change is not realistic. Yet this is what is intended by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. I and others have argued that such a narrow vision may be a mistake. Resolving smaller pieces of the bigger problem can build mutual trust and confidence, and create momentum that might start us in the right direction.

There are models for such an approach. In a number of publications, Barry Blechman, Micah Ziegler, and I have examined the example of international weapons treaties. Efforts to control nuclear weapons also started with UN members negotiating along highly idealistic lines (the seeming Cold War non-starter of “general and complete disarmament,” for example). But when the Cuban Missile crisis dramatically reminded everyone of the dangers of unrestrained nuclear weapons proliferation, the conversation quickly became more practical. One-by-one, smaller agreements began to prohibit nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, and under the seas; set a framework for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons; and peel off other parts of this knotty challenge. Smaller groups within the UN, as well as regional and bi-lateral approaches, proliferated, even when larger negotiations floundered. The results haven’t been perfect, but where most informed observers thought there would likely be two dozen or more nuclear powers by the end of the 20^th century, there are currently only nine.

Re-Examine Assumptions and Narrow the Focus

Another way of looking at this is to consider how realistic the basic assumptions that appear to be driving the UNFCCC model are. These include:

• An “if you build it, they will come” assumption that global agreement will produce domestic results;
• An assumption that every nation must come to agreement, despite their widely varying responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions;
• Adherence to a consensus model that sometimes gives disproportionate power to smaller, and frankly, less-relevant countries to block progress;
• Excessive concern about the formality of ratification;
• An impulse to try to decide every climate-related issue together;
• A belief that climate change is an environmental matter to be decided by environmental experts; and
• A belief in markets as a primary tool for greenhouse gas reduction.

If these assumptions don’t make sense in today’s world or if they don’t support an adequately robust basis for managing global greenhouse gas emissions, they should be reconsidered (for more on this, read my article for the Environmental Law Institute).

An alternative approach is to narrow down the issues and negotiating parties to those best situated to solve them, using the international weapons treaty model. This would put more energy into working directly with the handful of major greenhouse gas emitters and perhaps sequence issues more opportunistically, rather than waiting for consensus on the hardest things.

In fact, a great deal of this is already going on, albeit quietly. A coalition of UN organizations and member governments, including the United States, has announced plans to limit black carbon and other specific pollutants that contribute to rapid warming. Forums such as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, and the G-20 are developing alternative communication channels and some are working on discrete issues such as adaptation and mitigation technology.

It would be encouraging if this marked a quiet trend away from depending entirely on the single UNFCCC model, but significant parts of the climate community continue to focus on the hope that negotiations in Paris in 2015 will produce their grand agreement. For some who have invested much of their careers in the hope of the UNFCCC, loyalty to that body has become a litmus test for concern about climate change itself, so even a hint of lack of faith in the negotiation process is fought tooth and nail.

But unconventional threats require unconventional responses. Climate change is a challenge that cries out for creative improvising.