Author: Felicia Wang

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.

At a roundtable with other students and young people at the Climate Mobility Pavilion (thanks Gabriela for organizing!) we shared “our expectations” for COP29 and whether or not they had been met. I said I never believed in the COP process anyway, but there after being here I learned that there were some merits. The main sticking point is that COP gives smaller nations a platform that they do not have otherwise to express their voices/needs. It is allegedly the only space where people can come together across the world to work on climate solutions in a comprehensive, global way. No other space accounts for total global emissions and keeps track of global progress.

At the roundtable, a lot of the students and other young people had no idea what was going on with the actual negotiations. Many of them were running pavilion events all day, or there to network, or there to learn about some types of climate technologies, all useful to their work on climate. Therefore, they also expressed COP as a good space to meet other people and make connections so we can work on climate together. People refer to this dual purpose of COP as the “COP inside of COP” aka technical UN climate negotiations vs. everything else at COP (mainly networking and panels.)

A couple counterarguments that I was thinking about during the roundtable and on a conversation on the bus home:

1. There are other networking spaces that connect local, grassroots climate organizers that are doing projects on the ground. COP doesn’t connect local organizers. Unfortunately, the recent lack of funding, conflicts, and existential crises in the climate movement have led to many of these spaces’ declines, e.g. PowerShift Network, Climate Nexus. (Some like Climate Xchange and Climate Advocacy Lab are still doing great though.) I think these spaces are a lot better than COP for serving as connection hubs because they require people to be more intentional with what they are looking for (as opposed to COP being just the largest, cloutiest climate conference.)
   1. There are similar spaces for the more tech/business side of climate as well, such as NY Climate Week, SF Climate Week, some climate tech slacks, etc.
   2. These networking spaces are also more flexible based on need timelines and exist throughout the year, whereas COP happens once a year. Therefore, COP is less conducive to facilitating long-term deep collaboration in a timely manner, as climate is a time-sensitive issue and many projects are time-sensitive.
   3. COP is expensive and a huge waste of resources. Someone told me that renting a pavilion space costs $60,000 (although I could not find a source to back it up), which is a full staff person’s salary for a year of climate work, not to mention all of the merch and decorations and equipment for each pavilion. To me, the cost-benefit analysis does not check out. The entire cost of the pavilion section at COP for “connections” could be funneled into projects that are actively making a difference. Also the emissions/costs to get everybody and everything there is insane.
   4. The quality of panels are kind of arbitrary. Some were very informative and helped people get connected to funders for awesome on-the-ground climate projects (I saw this happen with Climate Finance Access Network); others were poorly run and uninformative.
2. The COP process is totally arbitrary. It makes my imploded North Carolina coalitions look well-facilitated. There are too many people that study organizational strucutre/design, meeting facilitation, etc. for this to be the best that we can do, process-wise. The structure is also totally inequitable and dependent on the host country/Presidency. It may be the one platform where smaller, poorer countries have a voice, but that voice is by no means equal.
   1. “This is what always the developed world does to us in all multilateral agreements. They push and push and push until the last minute. They get us tired, they get us hungry, they get us dizzy, and then we come to terms with agreements that don’t truly represent the needs of our people.” – Panama’s climate envoy, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez
   2. The texts that have been released by the Presidency are super imbalanced toward developed nations. They are able to pressure developing nations into accepting bad agreements because they need money.
   3. The Azerbaijani Presidency has been historically unprecedented (but similar to Denmark) in how opaque their facilitation is, which is actively harming the negotiation process.
      1. Sometimes civil society knows more than smaller country delegations because of our connections to richer country delegations. This is crazy to me, how are parties supposed to negotiate if they are kept out of the loop? Least-developed countries (LDCs) and small island states (SIDs) have complained about not being consulted as well.
      2. At the Just Transition technical consultation toward the end of Thursday (11/21), the co-facilitators basically said that parties were only allowed to discuss bracketed options. The Presidency put forward a text on Thursday morning that no one had agreed on yet; it was just an attempt at compiling viewpoints. Some paragraphs have “bracketed options” or “options” or “brackets,” which are different options that the parties can choose from. There are a couple problems with this process:
         1. The parties never agreed on the rest of the text that was not formatted as options–the Presidency wrote them. Rather than letting the parties go line-by-line through the text to agree on each part, the co-facilitators only let them discuss the “options.” This means the Presidency maintained control of the vast majority of the text. Every party was upset about this.
         2. The options provided were often extreme. For the Thursday NCQG text, the Presidency provided options that were redlines for either side (for example, an extreme option in favor of developing nations that developed would definitely not agree to, and vice versa.) There were compromise texts that existed and had been drafted by parties in collaboration, but they were not included. By only including extreme options, the Presidency set the text up for failure because they knew that each option was unacceptable to some party.
         3. The Just Transition consultation was also at 10:30 PM and not announced until after I had left the COP venue around 7 PM. Talk about inaccessible.
         4. In fact, the parties were so upset with the facilitation of the Just Transition Work Programme, Brazil ran its own parallel consultation process, which may not have been super helpful because the work done was not recognized by the Presidency, which wanted control of the text.
      3. The Presidency monopolized consultations as well, and forced parties to consult them one-by-one or in subgroups/groups whenever things went awry. This centralization of control hampers any negotiation process.
      4. They were also more strict on what was open to the public or not, and had many negotiations behind closed doors. I heard that in Dubai, more sessions were public, also because the rooms were bigger and had less capacity constraints.
      5. The Presidency monopolized the writing of the text. They would drop new texts on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday that were written by themselves based on what they thought was a good compilation, with no sort of public negotiation/agreement process in between.
      6. The Just Transition Work Programme ultimately failed to get adopted and got kicked to COP30…yet there were many things parties agreed on, such as concrete outcomes, that I believe could have been passed if the process were different.
   4. “Nearly 30 years on, the entire rules of procedure remain in draft form, although they are applied at each COP session, as if they were adopted.” – Dr. Joanna Depledge
      1. The parties could not agree on the rules for voting at the beginning (Rule 42 ), so this entire process (and decision-making) has been conducted under “Provisional [Draft] Rules of Procedure” since 1992 and defaulted to a consensus process. If parties don’t come to a consensus, then it goes to Rule 16, which means that the issue gets automatically passed on to the next session (unless otherwise decided by the COP.)
      2. The Azerbaijani Presidency gaveled through most decisions at COP29 without proper procedure (but I suppose there is none.) On the NCQG decision, he ignored the Indian delegation’s request for making a statement before the decision, proposed the decision, and put the gavel down without waiting for objections. Afterward, numerous countries objected (Bolivia, Cuba, Malawi on behalf of LDCs, India, etc), but it was too late and the decision was adopted. That is just bonkers to me. What is even crazier is that this is not even the first time; there is precedent for “consensus” decisions getting adopted despite objections at previous COPs! For a while, people were unsure whether or not to even call the decision because of the chaotic and undemocratic process…how do countries let this happen?
   5. Also, the negotiations (that I have sat in on at least) are so unstructured. They often talk in circles with no ostensive agenda or respect for time and I am shocked they are able to get anywhere at all. There is even a running joke that all the parties can agree on is to “thank the co-chairs or co-facilitators” because they spend 15+ minutes thanking each other every time.
   6. The Presidency’s choice to call a plenary a “Qultunary” (which Wikipedia will tell you is a term based on Turkic/Mongol assemblies) epitomizes how arbitrary the entire process is. Whether and when they choose to schedule technical consultations, contact groups, informals, plenaries, etc. all seemed pretty arbitrary to me too.
3. The amount of funding that is actually being discussed at COP is pretty sad compared to other finance flows (both climate and not climate) and what the world needs (trillions). To me, there seem like there are better spaces to discuss climate financing that 1) deal with more money total 2) are less bureacuratic and more streamlined 3) more connected to projects on the ground through direct access mechanisms and 4) are more well-rounded, locally-led/-driven, and need-based rather than based on technical processes or market calculations. By well-rounded, I mean address intersectional issues with climate, such as gender, education, and poverty.
   1. Climate Finance Access Network: I talked to someone at COP who will soon have secured $130 million for her island nation’s climate projects in just one year by writing grant proposals to various regional and direct access entities.
   2. WECAN funds great local projects without any of this COP money.
      1. E.g. the Itombwe reforestation project, which has been going for almost 10 years and is a long-term, women-led, community-led solution. They’ve grown close to 1 million trees by hand and allocate 25% of the trees for human use (home, food, etc.) As a result, communities no longer go into old-growth forest (which are more effective carbon sinks than new-growth) to harvest natural resources. They have thus created a circular and sustainable relationship with the forest that allows human flourishing. Osprey, founder of WECAN, emphasized the point that the money required to do this project was actually not that much and it was self-sustaining. But the money was grant-based. She also acknowledged that loans can be done well and effectively, but indigenous communities and developing nations are owed finance based on historical harm (reparations)– which is an argument toward COP’s existence: to facilitate reparations.
   3. Another person on that same panel from the UN Environmental Programme also emphasized the need to look at smaller bodies for funds, not just global funds like the ones dealt with at COP. These smaller bodies can be more easily accessed, are more connected to locals, and have less barriers.
   4. So maybe, what we need, is to build up smaller regional funds, like SPC, which will take (waste) less time/energy/bureaucracy than COP to do. We need to implement direct access mechanisms (in and out of UNFCCC funds) and build capacity, putting trained people in the right places to channel funds to local communities. All of these aforementioned really cool projects made me question if we really do need a COP-style climate finance goal through funds like the GCF/GEF that are highly inaccessible, slow, etc. but those funds are designed to have equitable boards that represent developing nations.

On the contrary, speaking to those in Climate Action Network’s (CAN) Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) Working Group presented the opposite view, that COP is necessary. The debate at COP29 was if the JTWP would be actionable items and concrete implementation vs. a knowledge sharing platform.

What I learned was that by “actionable items,” CAN and other nations mean that they want countries to submit proposals on

1. governance, how the JTWP is going to be run (e.g. a separate body from the UNFCCC)
2. decisions that can be acted upon soon
3. decisions that require more time to decide.

(And these “decisions” are things like guidance for the just transition and recommendations for implementation.)

So reductively….“actionable items” means countries will submit proposals on principles to guide a just transition (and other things). As an American, this was ridiculous because civil society in America has already come up with principles for a just transition from the grassroots and climate justice movements that we are actively using to implement our just transition. Why can’t we just have a locally-led just transition that follows grassroots principles so we can get this done because we don’t have time left?

And then I got schooled by one of the working group leads. She was like yeah, I get it, you’re from America, you have the IRA, and you have a just transition and it’s going great. But for countries in the Global South, they can try to request financing for a just transition but then the WTO or whatever bank led by the United States will just reject their request because they don’t consider just transition as part of climate finance. A lot of global funds/banks have “just transition” principles but they are greenwashing and support business-as-usual, so when they claim to support “just transition” they don’t.

And she also told me, of course this is your opinion, the US is the big player in the room and doesn’t care about what the JTWP will say. This platform, at the UNFCCC is the only platform in the world where smaller, developing nations who need that finance can actually have a voice and make sure that their “just transition” principles embody a just transition.

For example, if you requested financing to pay the salaries of laid-off coal workers in a developing nation, that’s not climate finance. That doesn’t fall under adaptation, mitigation, or loss and damage, and any multilateral fund (led by the Global North) would tell you no, you can’t have climate finance. But it should be climate finance, which is why it is up to the Just Transition Work Programme to set those principles and definitions so that things like that can actually count as climate finance and get climate finance.

Developing nations also have totally different situations, with economies that are dependent on fossil fuels and require a lot more support and careful thought to transition, whereas the US is not like that. Many nations don’t have just transition principles or a history of just transition and social justice like the US does, and so if we tell them to do a “just transition” they won’t know what that means OR they just won’t do it in an actually just way. Part of our privilege in the US is our ability to speak out about things without fear of consequences (relatively speaking, compared to say South America, “the most dangerous continent to be a climate defendant” – Majo Andrade Cerda). But for other countries, the JTWP principles would give them a legitimate framework to advocate around, that their governments had signed on to.

So the JTWP does matter for other nations, even if it seems like abstract recommendations and doesn’t matter to the US because we are working on the just transition and don’t care what the UN says.

The election permeated every event I went to. In response to media pessimism that the US elections would incapacitate COP negotiations were two primary (non-mutually exclusive) sentiments:

1. Desperate, relentless optimism. “The laggards must find the political will [to act]” was Executive Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia Yeb Saño’s response at Greenpeace’s press conference.
2. Disillusionment with national governments no matter who was in office, we just have to do it ourselves. Jacob Johns (Hopi and Akimel O’odham Tribes) acknowledged the lack of action even under Biden at the US CAN Wisdom Keepers press conference: “We call for our so-called progressive governments to stand up and create a path to leadership…if we looking at the left wing and right wing governments, we both know they are wings of the same bird.”

Both Climate Action Network (CAN) and the US Delegation took the first approach (they do not often see eye to eye): we are going to try to get as much done as possible, and we should not let the election results stop the progress that science requires.

At the CAN Communications team meeting, they presented crisis responses on rumors that Article 6 may be gavelled through at the opening plenary without following procedure and of course, the US election. They instructed us to respond to any reporter that asked about the US being a lame duck, “wait, so the US runs your country?” to encourage other countries to step up and urge the US to not obstruct negotiations they will likely not return to. After all, the US has never paid its fair share of finance for the past 30 years.

A Center for Biological Diversity press conference focused on ramping up US action in the next two months and not letting other countries hide behind US inaction. Specific durable actions called for were an OECD phase out of $41 billion of oil and gas financing, setting a roadmap for subnational governments to take leadership, packing the court, and shutting down pending projects like the Dakota Access pipeline. RINGO’s US Delegation briefing had much of the same desperate optimism, denouncing the “lame duck” idea but emphasizing how the US would still show up.

On the other hand, the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform Knowledge Sharing session emphasized the second, speaking of disillusionment of all administrations, as they feel they are left to fend for themselves no matter who’s in office. I had nice informal conversations with many others critical of COP and how disconnected and unimpactful it was on local organizing.

One such leader ranted to me about how grassroots aren’t funded anyway, and definitely not so by inaccessible complex global funds, so it did not really matter to him what the NCQG figure was. To him, a change would be to have any money available as many countries do not have the capacity to apply for funding or are discriminated against for corruption while COP29 itself is corrupt: “those that pollute are those setting the agenda.” Instead, grassroots and indigenous communities do the adaptation work themselves while projects are proposed by technical processes that are out-of-touch with local communities.

Other people I spoke with were more nuanced but had similar viewpoints on COP’s out-of-touchness with on-the-ground climate work. The fund figures are paltry and unseen by most communities, yet they require years of exhausting negotiations.

But then why did all of these people keep coming back to COP, if that was their sentiment? And their answer was always the same desperate optimism, that they have no option but to try to change the system even if they did not believe in it at all.