As a first-time attendee at the COP, it was a bit overwhelming. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising, but at the time it was a lot to take in. The sheer size and scope of the conference was impressive, and simply figuring out where everything was on the first day took the better part of the day. Once I, and the rest of my cohort from Duke, had our bearings, we set about trying to accomplish the tasks we were there for: working for our clients, and engaging with the diverse peoples, topics, and initiatives represented at the conference.

The first half of this proved relatively straightforward for me. My client, the Climate Registry, didn’t have enough staff to attend every event they had a vested or peripheral interest in. I attended these events and took notes. My summaries were used by them to understand what occurred at these presentations, meetings, and panel discussions, and the quotes that I recorded were used in social media posts to inform their followers about what was happening at the COP.

The second half was much more overwhelming. There were people present at the COP from literally every country in the world, and every person that I interacted with was passionate and engaged with some aspect of climate change. While the gravity of the mission and work that was being done at the COP was an undercurrent for many of my conversations, the fact that I was an American was rarely a talking point, for better or worse. I believe that the large subnational U.S. presence at COP23 helped to preserve a large portion of the reputation that Americans have for international engagement, and despite the official U.S. delegation’s pro-coal stance, it seemed that the people present at the COP understood that they didn’t speak for the rest of us. During the pro-coal presentation by the U.S. delegation, a large protest convened outside of their meeting room:

The chanting and noise depicted in this video persisted for a solid 20 minutes, and could be heard throughout the Bonn zone. While the energy evidenced in this protest was the only time I witnessed something of this magnitude at the COP, the sentiment was palpable elsewhere in the seriousness of the conversations that I had with other attendees and the art present in the park outside of the COP.

A sculpture of a polar bear impaled on an oil drill

All things considered, my experience at the COP was inspiring, humbling, and exhausting. Though the days were long, the conversations, speeches, and presentations that they were filled with were a welcome reminder of the talented men and women who have dedicated their careers to climate action and our planet. Though the Paris Agreement, and the product of the negotiations that occurred this year at COP23 and have yet to occur during the Facilitative Dialogue next year in Katowice, Poland at COP24, are a step in the right direction, we still have a long way to go before the threats to our planet’s climate are put to rest.