I told some people that I met my Uncle Iroh (wise old man spiritual connection) at COP29 on the Climate Action Network (CAN) Communications team, and we discussed what it means to ignore real people at COP.

What was really interesting was that he told me that the climate space is the least toxic space he has worked in, compared to any other humanitarian organization, like those that support refugees. For some reason, people are able to come together and put their differences aside to focus on a common goal (climate.) And I said, I have an alternate but similar theory—it is less toxic because climate (not climate justice) is kind of a first-world problem and it is a more privileged space.

He said, absolutely! But climate’s removal from the people it impacts is what actually makes it less mentally traumatic and thus toxic to to the people working in it. Climate is so disconnected from the people it impacts, that it’s actually easier to focus on solving it and not feel like you’re drowning all the time. Climate is less stressful.

“We don’t think about the world outside, maybe that makes it easier for us.”

And I said, but isn’t that a problem? That we don’t center people? That we aren’t centering justice? That when people speak on press conferences they can’t tell a personal story but spit out the same numbers that have been repeated hundreds of times?

He said yes, but isolating climate makes people focus in on something they feel is solvable, because they can’t deal with everything else. But really, climate is interconnected and impacting people and related to all the other spaces that are more stressful. When we forget about people, we makes this space inaccessible and exclusive, too wrapped up in technical details. We lose our imagination, humanity, and intentionality behind the work. We become able to tolerate “sacrifice zones” for the “greater good” of climate action. We also have a harder time communicating why this work matters to everyone else. Rather than repeating the same systems/processes that caused the climate crisis, Xiye Bastida (at a side event) calls on us “to make our activism look exactly like what we want our future to look like.”

And so I asked him, how do we connect it to people? How do we shift the narrative and center the local communities/stories that all this climate finance stuff is actually supposed to support? How do we make COP feel less removed from the people it’s supposed to help? I don’t have any answers yet, but let me tell one story from COP for now.

Here is Adrian Martinez’s from La Ruta del Clima:

He is at COP because he believes that even developed nations see climate finance as charity, but it’s not charity, it is the right of developing nations to have that finance. It is not developing nations’ fault that their communities are being destroyed by climate change. Withholding finance is like if you broke someone’s things and didn’t pay for it.

For his nonprofit, he has to get small grants to do small projects and weave them together into a complex web of communities to do a bigger project—which speaks to the fundamentally flawed nature of nonprofit funding that is projects-based, small-scale, and short-term. What he used to do was case studies with local communities to document their climate losses because so many losses are invisible—they happen too slowly and also the younger generation doesn’t even notice because they didn’t know what life was like before. So, it has to be documented because it is their right to be paid back for what developed nations took away.

For example, he met some fishermen who had their houses right up to the high tide line. He, not being from the area, thought that was normal. But they told him it actually wasn’t normal, why would they do that, that was stupid. They usually built their houses 100 meters from the high tide line, but because of climate change, the tide was right up to their doorstep. He also spoke of similar houses in another community being made of expensive concrete due to a big loan they took out, and people (investors, outsiders) would see the houses right up against the water and think the community was stupid. But the community wasn’t stupid, the tide rose because of climate change.

It’s also not just physical losses. One Colombian village had a tradition of women bathing in the moonlight, but the river dried up and they lost that spiritual tradition. He also did education because the communities did not associate their losses with climate change. If communities aren’t educated on climate then they blame themselves for their loss, but it is not their fault. For example, a village in the Honduras had a festival centered around crabs but the crabs stopped coming and they didn’t know why, but it was because of climate change.

But he realized later on that case studies were too expensive so he decided to switch documentation strategies to data reporting, like in citizen science. So instead, he now equips them with tools and skills to report data that can be used to track loss and damages so they can (in the future) access funding.

However, he noted that he didn’t care where the funding came from, and the Loss & Damage Fund specifically looked less promising because of the lack of direct access for entities. In fact, part of his role at COP was trying to push for direct access mechanisms to the Fund so communities like the one he works with can get finance.