Smartsettle at COP: Turning Climate Consensus into Coordinated Action

How Simpol and Smartsettle are reimagining global cooperation on climate change.

For three decades, the world’s nations have gathered annually at the United Nations Climate Conferences (COP) to confront the growing threat of climate change. While science has reached near-unanimous consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming, global action has lagged. The challenge today is not a lack of knowledge — it’s the difficulty of achieving fair, simultaneous action across diverse national interests.

At Smartsettle Resolutions, we’ve joined forces with the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) initiative to explore how our negotiation technology can help break this impasse.

The Problem: Cooperation without Coordination

The COP process depends on voluntary pledges — Nationally Determined Contributions — that each country adopts on its own terms. This bottom-up structure encourages participation, but it also fosters hesitation. Every nation fears being the first to move, or moving too far alone. Meanwhile, emissions continue to rise. As recent research notes, global climate inaction is often rooted in flaws in our decision-making architecture itself (Sustainability, 2024).

Smartsettle Infinity addresses this by helping parties explore all the issues simultaneously and identify global packages that are demonstrably fair and mutually beneficial.Simpol complements this by providing a political mechanism that ensures those agreements are adopted together — no country acting alone.

Together, these tools form a complete system for cooperation:

Smartsettle finds the agreement.

Simpol ensures it happens.

The Project: A COP Simulation for Real Solutions

Working with a small international team, we’ve built a COP-style negotiation simulation involving sixteen country groups. Participants enter their climate-related preferences — emissions reductions, financial contributions, technology access, and penalties for missed targets — into Smartsettle’s secure digital platform.

The system then helps them discover an optimal package that all parties prefer to the status quo. The result is a simulated global consensus — one that could, in principle, be implemented simultaneously through the Simpol framework.

A short video demonstration and executive summary will soon be available on our website. The simulation shows that a trillion-dollar annual global benefit can be unlocked when nations act cooperatively instead of competitively.

Why It Matters

This project demonstrates that:

• Global cooperation can be modeled, measured, and improved.

• Fairness can be quantified through algorithms rather than rhetoric.

• Nations can act together safely when no one is asked to go first.

It’s a glimpse of how a future COP could work — one that not only debates, but decides.

Next Steps

We’re preparing a short video walkthrough of the simulation and supporting materials for both Smartsettle Resolutions and Simpol.org. This collaboration offers a model for decision-making that could extend beyond climate to global peacebuilding, governance, and sustainable development.

Stay tuned as we share updates from the Toda Barcelona Peace and Governance Workshop, where this project will be presented for the first time.

More peace, sooner & smarter.— The Smartsettle Resolutions Team