With each additional leg of our journey, we get closer to arriving at an international convention of world leaders, experts, students, and advocates. Currently, I am sitting at a café in the Cairo International Airport with my travel companions, Isabel and Fabian, as we wait out our layover before our flight to Sharm el-Sheikh. While my actual experience at COP27 hasn’t begun yet, I have already had interesting conversations. On the 11-hour flight from JFK to Cairo, I turned to my left and struck up a conversation with an older Egyptian gentleman. He told me that he was leaving America after many decades, because his 30-year marriage with an Italian-American woman had ended. He, as an immigrant father, and I, as a son of an immigrant, reflected on how growing up in America can be a constant struggle between balancing your family’s culture and the dominant culture of your friends, schoolmates, and society at-large. He also told me he was returning to Egypt to reconnect with friends and reignite his passion for adventure and sightseeing. To my left, another older Egyptian gentleman asked me why I was traveling to the country, and I told him I was attending COP. After telling me about how he was a practicing physician in Buffalo, NY, he told me he was going back to Egypt to see family as well as see the progress Egypt had made in the past three years under the new president. He suggested that I pay attention to how Egyptians feel about the president, who, according to him, is quite popular and has made significant progress on infrastructure and rural development. I was glad to have these conversations, and I was also left with travel recommendations such as visiting Mount Sinai, going diving to see the Blue Holes, and visiting Tahrir square in Cairo.

In addition to watching the Joker on the plane, I also used the time to listen to a two-episode podcast series by the Economist on COP27. They went into depth on the current conversation around loss and damage, as well as potential progress on funding for adaptation. Initially, I was skeptical about how loss and damage funding would work in practice. How can you determine whether an extreme weather event is directly caused by climate change? How do you determine who is responsible? What about slow-onset events like sea-level rise or even increases in the prevalence and range of infectious diseases? How do you place a monetary value on damages to nature or on human life? While many of these questions still remain in my mind, I was fascinated to hear about innovative modeling approaches that can estimate the severity of a weather event compared to the counterfactual (a world without climate change). For example, suppose a country experiences a heat wave of 40 degrees Celsius and 300 people die. In that case, the model can estimate how much colder the heat wave would have been in a non-global warming world, and how many fewer people would have died—the additional deaths would be considered “losses.” It can also factor in countries’ historical GHG emissions to determine relative responsibility. As we head into Week 2 of a convention that has been branded the “implementation” COP, I am intrigued to track the progress on compensation for loss and damages at COP, and the extent to which it is operationalized.

Aside from tracking loss and damages, which will be a popular focus, I am also interested in learning about developments in clean technology and decarbonization strategies, especially green hydrogen, which I believe has significant promise. Finally, I am excited to sit in on the negotiations at the plenaries and observe the dynamic amongst the G20 countries and between so-called developed and developing nations.

With all the uncertainty and strife present in today’s world, including the rise of fascism and right-wing extremism, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the flooding in Pakistan, I hope that world leaders will recognize how important it is to come together, address the biggest and most threatening problem of our generation, and agree on meaningful climate action that will move everyone forward, while also putting the most vulnerable populations first.