It’s hard to believe how quickly week one at COP24 passed. Attending this monumental event was a very enlightening and motivating experience. There was a lot of information to absorb, and a lot of discussions to track, but we all walked away with an understanding of the complexity that goes into international negotiations. The end result of COP24 is a rulebook for implementing the Paris Agreement and we were lucky enough to witness the intricate, and often frustrating, work that goes into developing such a comprehensive document.

I think that attending both the negotiations and the side events provided a balance of understanding the intense process behind creating this Paris rulebook and hearing authentic experiences of environmental leaders around the world who are passionate about climate action. Working with the Environmental Defense Fund this week, I was tasked with following issues on transparency and increasing ambition. The negotiation sessions on transparency were often dry and repetitive. The same parties tended to speak (United States, Brazil, EU, Saudi Arabia) and they spent most of the time emphasizing and repeating what other parties had presented. They spent hours at a time picking apart text, the use of brackets, and trying to push their parties’ agenda forward.

The side events were much more fast paced and exciting, especially because they tended to lean towards speakers who have implemented projects and programs in their state, city or local communities. These events covered every conceivable topic around climate change. I attended sessions involving mitigation, transparency, youth involvement, aviation, increasing ambitions, and the IPCC report. I wanted to attend sessions that interested me, but I also wanted to make sure I was following topics that my NGO client (EDF) didn’t have the time to cover but wanted information on.

Delving into transparency and increased ambition, and hearing experiences from environmental leaders, increasing transparency tended to involve incorporating it into any regional, national, or local climate policy. Integrating transparency from the beginning made it much easier for these countries and sub-national actors to report their emissions, and to do it in an efficient and effective manner. They also emphasized the importance of involving the private sector, as it can be challenging to engage them in climate action, but their participation is necessary to achieving our targets.

Moving forward from this experience I took away a few key messages. One is that I need to start a vegetarian diet as soon as possible. Another is that while we may feel helpless at points operating under a federal administration that refuses to take action on climate change, we have a certain level of influence in our personal circles. Climate action can be taken at an individual level by changing your diet, electing state and local officials who are pro-climate, or even convincing loved ones to take those small steps to reducing their carbon footprint. Ultimately, that holds a lot of power, and we will not be able to reach our goals of mitigating climate change without individual action in addition to those actions at the higher levels.