Touching down in New York City, after a twelve-hour flight from Cairo, my WhatsApp notifications started buzzing. There was a decision on the loss and damage fund. I was incredibly exhausted and disoriented, but hopeful. Something big came out of COP27 and the United States moved, after thirty years of resisting calls for a loss and damage fund. This news right as I came back to the United States was a lovely welcome home and ending to COP27.
This sudden excitement and hopefulness paired with long periods of exhaustion and disorientation sums up the rest of my experience at COP27 as well. Coming into COP27 I did not comprehend its scale, with hundreds of events and 44,000 people navigating a labyrinth of buildings for two weeks straight. It was challenging to navigate the space and sort through the hundreds of negotiations, side events, press conferences, and pavilion events happening simultaneously all day. Before going to COP I did not understand that it is also a conference and trade show bringing together people to discuss issues, technologies, and solutions all related to climate change. Seeing the sheer number of side events and walking through the pavilion spaces filled me with hope to see so many people coming together from across the world to discuss this existential problem facing our planet. I moved from events discussing sustainable governance of aquatic foods, to near term actions in U.S. climate policy, to riverkeeper organizations across the world dealing with harms from dams, to a brief on U.S positions at COP27 from John Kerry, to the role of criminal law in climate action.
But spending time at the negotiations truly made this experience meaningful. I focused mostly on the loss and damage negotiations, so I noticed the power of groups like the Alliance of Small Island States and the G77+China. At each negotiation I scrambled to get the most updated text to follow along and see how even just one word could make one party unwilling to support a document. The process moved incredibly slowly, and delegates were often repetitive, but through patiently waiting I also heard how some parties’ positions began to shift, while others dug into their positions
During one afternoon one of my classmates heard about a Santiago Network negotiation that was added to the calendar last minute and was open to observers. I rushed across the COP27 grounds to arrive at a huge huddle of delegates in one corner of the room. I waited for about 20 minutes and then suddenly delegates began to clap. They took their seats and shared with the co-chair that they had agreed on text to operationalize the Santiago Network, a technical assistance network for loss and damage from climate change. Moments like this made me hopeful that this process was working, and some important global climate action would come out of COP27.
