I’m processing a wave of emotions from this second to last day of COP28. This began in the afternoon with the power and uplift of People’s Plenary, crescendoed with bearing witness to a 12 year old climate activist call for an “end to fossil fuels for our planet and for our futures” as she disrupted a High-Level discussion of the COP27 and 28 Presidencies, then slowly crashed down with the Presidency’s release of the weakened (though not unexpectedly) Global Stocktake text that had dropped fossil fuel phaseout language. My day concluded with the slow bureaucratic process of the final plenary session, marking the beginning of the ending of this COP, with the Parties agreeing to several agenda items, including the formal announcement of Azerbaijan—conspicuously marketed in the announcement video as a “land of peace”—as host of COP29.

As I’ve been reflecting today on the negotiations and trying to grasp the progress of the text over the previous few days, my mind keeps bouncing between the incredible flexibility and internal contradictions introduced by the “creative ambiguity” of diplomatic language, which pushes me further into reexamination of foundational ideas about the nature of language as a tool for social communication, and how this relates to power and cooperation. 

We are forced to grapple with the reality that every act of language-based communication is tied to corresponding acts of interpretation. I have a mental model that I try to translate into language that then is heard by you and then approximated into a unique model in your mind. The solution is for both people to share a language, because if words had immutable and mutually-agreed upon meanings, there would not be any risk of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. If we have sufficiently shared context, then your approximation of my meaning is close enough to the model I began with. And as such, we can engage in shared and coordinated action via shared from that understanding. I talk, you listen, we act. But that of course, is too often not how communication goes.

Even if we ostensibly share a language, shared language hardly seems sufficient for genuine understanding, because that assumes a stable and shared view of words and their meanings. Misunderstandings necessarily arise during communication because each of us is using distinct words—even if they look or sound identical—with unique meanings. Words have slightly different meanings depending on who’s involved in the communication. 

To add further complication for the purposes of multilateral diplomacy, what happens when we add multiple actors or introduce non-native speakers or listeners who must rely on internal or external processes of translation and interpretation before they arrive at understanding? During multiple capacity building sessions I’ve attended here at COP, I’ve heard various negotiators and policymakers from the Global South express some version of the sentiment that “translation is not enough” for them to engage effectively in negotiating or implementing the decisions of the UNFCCC. Each called for greater cultural or social contextualization of the diplomatic language, both from the bottom-up and top-down, in order to make climate action more effective at cutting emissions and reflective of the desires or needs of these communities. 

Two days ago in a negotiation session on the Mitigation Work Program, I was desperately writing down notes trying to capture the brackets, deletions, and additions to the draft, but also the mood and general sentiments of each Party’s position. Through that experience, in particular, I started to see this strange form of very particular communication that we call multilateral diplomacy as a strange and delicate balancing act of trying to create enough shared context such that the definitions and language are enough for cooperative action (which is why Australia and other wanted certain historic references added to the preamble and specific examples listed in the operational paragraphs), but also that this context also remains just vague, opaque, and unstructured enough to allow for sufficient linguistic ambiguity (as exemplified by China and the KSA’s calls to strike roughly half the text) to allow the various Parties in that negotiated space to retain integrity to some underlying values, identities, or national priorities.

If the diplomatic text is too linguistically clear, there can be no consensus. If it’s too vague, there can be no coordinated or meaningful action. Through that lens, I now see the Paris Agreement as this miraculous and yet (thus far) woefully inadequate innovation in communication that has helped to create sufficient shared understanding between disparate global actors to bend the emissions trajectory from a +3.6 to +4.2°C down to a 2.5ish°C path. 

Earlier this evening, Sultan Al Jaber, the COP President, called upon the Parties here to emulate the success of Paris:

“Together we have the opportunity to deliver history again. We can send a signal to the world that multilateralism does work, and this process can respond to what the science is telling us, that it can deliver for the most vulnerable and keep 1.5 within reach.” 

My worry is that as the science on our climate future gets even clearer, the decarbonization options and timelines get further compressed (as shown in the GST), and the necessary space for the linguistic flexibility that underpins diplomatic communication as I’ve described gets eliminated, and the likelihood of global cooperation to reach net zero will get that much smaller.

Will this COP rescue a firm call for a “fossil fuel phaseout/phase down” in the next 24 hours? Or is such language too unambiguous for multilateral diplomacy to work?