(Written 11/04/21!)

The spectacle of COP cannot be understated. This is the climate platform and the political optics alone are astonishing. The USA and other countries in the Global North have rolled out our highest profile (and environmentally sympathetic) politicians and celebrities, and already made surprisingly major new commitments—on day 2, I overheard British delegates express surprise at the breadth of the USA’s methane pledge. As a student and someone extremely new to the world of environmental treaties and politics, COP has been an incredible educational opportunity, but one that has required maintaining a constant critical eye and open ear (the amount of gossip, griping, and even political strategy you simply overhear standing in lines is honestly astonishing).

Initially, I was fully caught up in the hype and pageantry of COP and the proximity to fame and power: I’ve gotten to meet personal heroes like Secretary Haaland and as someone who calls New Mexico home, meeting her was incredible!! Celebrity culture absolutely does permeate climate conferences, as it turns out. The pavilions are impressive, the people you simply walk past are wildly powerful, and the upfront major commitments and international cooperation were shiny, new, and overflowing with a tone of hope.

By now, however, I feel… not pessimistic, but certainly less awestruck. There is a stark difference between the mood and tone inside the conference and the collective action and justice discourse occurring outside, and I’ve noticed major messaging gaps. Technological, public-private partnership solutions are being heralded as only the way forward, with little discussion by Global North powers of what different social changes (as adaptation & mitigation measures) could look like. Instead, the idea of the exporting of Northern standards of living and economic structures to the Global South as the only way to develop has prevailed. It’s not meant to be a catch-all solution, but it can feel like it. The language of environmental justice has interestingly been both co-opted and sidelined: I’ve heard leaders mention the importance of climate justice, but in-depth critical discussions of business as usual have largely been restricted to side events such as those at the Indigenous Peoples Pavilion.

Adaptation finance has been pushed, but not cooperative measures or plans to deal with what happens when adaptation measures in the face of an existential threat are simply insufficient. In environmental justice, we use a term called “sacrifice zones,” environments permanently harmed and deemed disposable. Local communities are almost always already marginalized, with these added environmental and economic harms compounding oppression. This is most examined in the context of pollution and toxic waste, but in the face of the climate crisis, small island nations and coastal communities are the frontlines of sacrifice (in the case of places like the Marshall Islands, they have already been a sacrificial zone for weapons testing, so this is salt in an infected wound). The longer we wait and the less we act to actually mitigate climate change—you cannot simply adapt an island that the weather is erasing—the more people and places we judge sacrificial. 

Climate (& environmental & economic & racial & more) justice has gained greater attention over the last year and a half and I’ve noticed it discussed or at least alluded to at COP, but I need to know whether this recognition is actually meaningful.