Author: Riley Pfaff

For all the excitement of attending a U.N. meeting aimed at combating climate change, this week at the COP also delivered a stark reality check. The scale of the global undertaking needed in the next several decades to prevent irreversible, catastrophic damage to the planet is hard to comprehend and often depressing to think about. During one particularly bleak presentation this week, my mind drifted to my other biggest passion outside of this work, baseball, and I found myself wondering why I wasn’t at Major League Baseball’s annual gathering in balmy San Diego this week instead.

But as I reflect on my experience this week in Madrid, I keep thinking of one of the very first events I went to early Monday morning about Niue, a tiny island associated with New Zealand in the South Pacific with a population of roughly 1600 people—smaller than my graduating class at Duke. At the event, Niue’s Minister of Natural Environment, Dalton Tagelagi, gave a presentation on the nation’s ocean conservation and management planning, and the difficult task of balancing commercial fishing and tourism interests with the needs of the islanders themselves. Other members of the Niuean delegation presented the state’s ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement, which includes a goal of achieving 80 percent renewable energy by 2025.

The high ambition exhibited by Niue and the many other small island states like it in mitigation and adaptation is unparalleled among large, high-emitting nations. To be fair, an 80 percent reduction of the emissions of an island population that could be housed comfortably on Duke’s East Campus is not even a blip on the world’s progress towards reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. And it is far easier to reduce 80 percent of Niue’s emissions compared to 80 percent of the United States’, or even 40 percent.

But relative ease and simplicity isn’t why these states have been the leaders on ambition in the UNFCCC process for years: more importantly, they lead on ambition because they already are the first and most impacted victims of climate change. Sea level rise, ocean acidification, depletion of natural ecosystems and the economies that depend upon them—these are problems that are happening now and causing significant damage to small island states. Leaders in Niue and other small island states are clear-eyed and staring these problems in the face, not obfuscating the causes and effects of the problem and delaying action to solve it in deference to self-serving, short-term desires for power and money. They are doing their share, however small, and setting an example of how to buckle up and address this crisis for others to follow.

This is not to say that every country should be expected policies to also totally rehaul their energy systems in the next five years, or even ten. But what we should expect of our leaders—and of ourselves—is the willingness to accept this problem is real, address it head on and find a place of common ground to get to work, however inconsequential those initial steps may seem. As we leave Madrid, I recognize the magnitude of the crisis we find ourselves in. But I’m also encouraged by Niue’s leaders to keep looking for areas where I can do my part, set my own example, and find ways to get to work.

The mood around the last day of the COP was quiet. Most of the pavilions were either closed or holding their final events; the negotiations which remained open to the public were fruitless and ended with no consensus. I slipped into one of the negotiations rooms to catch the end of a discussion, only to hear a steady stream of speakers from various countries all say the same thing: “We would also like to note our disappointment that no solution was reached on this issue…”

I, too, found myself feeling disappointed by the results coming out of the last two weeks of negotiations. I came to this COP understanding that international negotiations are painfully difficult and slow, but deep down I was still hopeful that we would get to be on hand for the next big breakthrough in combating climate change: a major decision on Article 6 and carbon markets, new promises for higher ambition—literally just anything positive.

Instead, one of the common themes of our group’s discussions this week was that we’d gotten yet another reality check. We met with people who’d been around the block with the UNFCCC process who voiced their own displeasure with the system and bleak outlook for the future. As a wide-eyed student still trying to process just a little bit of this enormous conference, hearing those opinions from veterans of the international climate change complex was difficult and frustrating.

But while the negotiations themselves were going nowhere, and a sour mood had seemingly settled on many of the 26,000 plus attendees, the COP marched on. There were large protests, and passionate speeches by activists pleading for more urgency. We got to hear from Time’s Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, as well as the former leading global voice on climate change Al Gore.

There were also countless side events and exhibits at individual nations’ pavilions covering an enormous range of different elements of climate change. It was these exhibits that gave me the most hope in the face of the bleak science staring us in the face and the futile discussions among ministers down the hall. Here, I learned about supply chain sustainability in China’s real estate industry, and learned about Indonesia’s progress on investing in green development. I got to talk to an Australian masters student about her new job she was about to begin working with carbon markets, and then listen to her boss help guide a discussion of the potential for a regional carbon market in the South Pacific. I gained a better understanding of the potential carbon capture and storage could have as a piece of the emissions reduction puzzle.

At these events and the many more I attended throughout the week, I was surrounded by people who’d dedicated their careers to combating this crisis in one capacity or another. This COP may not be remembered as an especially productive meeting, but the congregation of so many people working towards a similar goal is still something remarkable to a first-time attendee. The UNFCCC process has flaws and will generate loopholes that make progress on this issue slow. That’s the nature of international negotiations, and I realize that progress at the international level won’t be as fast as I’d like, or maybe even close it. It’s also just one piece of the broader effort to combat climate change, as the vast array of exhibits at the COP demonstrate. But as I get ready to leave this conference, I’m still determined to do this work, encouraged by the huge collection of people who gathered here the last two weeks to share ideas and find ways work together to solve this challenge.

As I drove to the airport in Raleigh yesterday, I called my parents to check in before I got on the first leg of my journey to Europe, where I along with five other Duke students will be attending COP 25 in Madrid this week. Our conversation turned to what I would be doing at the COP, and my dad remarked that it seemed like every year, this annual congregation of nations to address the climate crisis becomes even more pressing than the year before as the world continues to drag its feet on the issue. Following that logic, he said, this year’s conference, the 25^th of its kind, is the most urgent yet.

We’ve spent much of our class time this semester studying how the world arrived at its current situation regarding international climate change negotiations. Twenty-five years ago, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit. Since then, there have been especially successful conferences, none more so than the third COP in Kyoto in 1997 and COP 21 in Paris in 2015. There have also been conferences remembered more for their failures than whatever small pieces of progress were achieved at them (see Copenhagen, 2009).

For all the successes (and failures) of these past conferences, I’d agree with my dad: this COP is the most urgent and important one to date. NOAA projects 2019 will be among the four hottest years on record for the planet, and the present-day effects of climate change are already being felt in communities around the globe. When the year turns over in a few weeks, it will mark the beginning of a critical year in the implementation of the Paris Agreement, as next year is the first year many nations will need to step up their respective levels of ambition within their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Currently, the combined effects of the NDCs will not be enough for the world to meet its climate goals, including limiting global temperature rise to below 1.5°C before the end of the century.

With one week left in the 2019 conference, now is the chance for countries to begin to negotiate how they will accelerate progress next year addressing this crisis. In the first week of negotiations, slow progress was made on several issues, including the establishment of a global carbon market, an issue in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement that has been especially difficult to reach a consensus on. Hopefully, progress is made this week on carbon markets, time frames for reaching emissions reductions goals, and the myriad of smaller details to be worked on to address other elements of international climate policy.

I couldn’t be more excited to have the opportunity to be in Madrid this week to see how these negotiations play out and what path the world is on once this conference is complete. I’ve had experience learning about and working with U.S. climate change policy, but few chances to see how the world comes together to set a global path on this issue. I am incredibly grateful to Duke and Bass Connections for giving me the opportunity to have this experience and gain that knowledge, and I can’t wait for week two to begin tomorrow morning.