COP28 has concluded with the Presidency announcing it as a success because it finally includes some fossil fuel language. However many are dissatisfied due to factors such as a lack of differentiated timelines for developed and developing countries and the plethora of loopholes in the texts.

With the COP concluded, I have been thinking about its structure and how conducive the environment created by the conference is for a globally beneficial agreement. In the first week, most negotiations and informal consultations were scheduled for an hour. That is not enough time for each member state to speak or process what has been said and respond. Would it not be better to have a reasonable agenda for each meeting and stay until it is fulfilled? As the days passed these meetings got longer but so did the calls for informal informal meetings (inf infs). Why didn’t these conversations happen before COP itself? Climate talks in Bonn during the summer are meant to be agenda setters for COP but this year there was limited progress due to multiple disagreements. And again on the first day of COP28, the opening plenary was delayed due to disagreements over agenda. When so much time is spent simply on deciding what to talk about, how can we have honest compromises on actual language?

I was able to sit in on half an informal consultation on the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance after watching a couple of negotiations and consultations on the topic from overflow rooms and was surprised to see the number of delegates not paying attention to the speaker. After hours in overflow rooms, I almost stopped trying to get into actual negotiation rooms but I am glad I didn’t because then I would not have been able to see the EU scoff when Egypt spoke or watch Nepal and Gambia whispering throughout. It often felt like people were speaking and no one was really listening. Everyone knows each other’s positions and it seems the powerful few want to maintain the status quo with the guise of wanting progress.

An artificial deadline of two weeks is imposed on climate negotiation to force an agreement. Is this helpful or does it just mean that delegations have to leave without reaching a satisfying conclusion due to time constraints? When so much is at stake, it seems silly to play into any artificial constraints. The Global Stocktake text was passed while Samoa, the spokesperson of AOSIS, was still making their way to the venue. No objections were made to the text, even though several nations stated displeasure. I felt as though everyone was too tired and worn out from two weeks of late nights and early mornings, with immune systems wrecked from too much coffee and interacting with people from all over the world, to put up a real fight and just wanted the conference to end regardless of the outcome. Many of the texts were not even drafted till the last couple of days.

I wonder if the format of these negotiations and its top-down approach that reinforces existing power dynamics is the way we will solve our climate crisis. I hope we find quicker, more equitable, and more just solutions so we can act in true solidarity.