Author: Ian Hitchcock

Overwhelming. Interesting. Deeply Ironic.

These are the words that first come to mind as I reflect on my experience at COP28 in Dubai. I came into this class with a healthy skepticism of the conflicts of interest inherent in having a petrostate like the UAE serve as the host of a climate conference in opulent spaces built off fossil fuel wealth. While nothing I experienced during my time in Dubai caused me to cast off my skepticism, I did come to see the convening of the COP as valuable. Ultimately, I found the COP process to be a necessary but not sufficient effort to address the myriad crises caused by our collapsing climate.

I chose to focus my time much more on the side events and pavilion convenings rather than closely following the negotiations. During my time in what has essentially become “Climate Coachella,” I met truly inspiring people, including global leaders I’ve long admired such as Vice President Al Gore and the heads of the UN Environment Program, NRDC, and EDF. I had conversations with incredible climate activists, dedicated nonprofit leaders, and fellow students searching for their place to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the climate challenge.  I attended fascinating panel discussions on topics as varied as infrastructure resilience, loss and damage funding mechanisms, and citizen science. The fact that COPs regularly bring together earnest people seeking practical solutions is undeniably a good thing and was something that I was privileged to be a part of.

I think that the COP is most useful as a kind of forcing mechanism. The focused global attention that the COP creates on climate issues is a kind of gravitational pull that encourages governments, nonprofits, and businesses to release reports, announce new climate actions, and promise greater ambition. While many of these resources and commitments tend to vanish with little notice, some of the announcements do become actual initiatives that reduce emissions, create new funding streams for climate finance, and shed light on the best paths forward.

But when it comes to the outcomes of the negotiations themselves, ostensibly the reason COP happens at all, I am far less certain. The fact that any text coming out of the negations must be agreed to by consensus means that the world is held hostage to the lowest common denominator of acceptable ambition. That is part of the reason why the burning of fossil fuels, a practice so obviously driving harmful pollution has not been called out in text at any of the 27 previous COPs. Whether calls to phase out fossil fuels will make it into the final text remains to be seen.

While COP28 was filled with inspiring and alliterative slogans like “turning ambition into action,” I didn’t see many accountability mechanisms to move these pronouncements from rhetoric to reality. The gulf between voluntary pledges and climate progress is cavernous, and our situation gets increasingly dire the longer that we dawdle.

I am left wondering, at the end of the day what is COP really for?

As someone who plans to work on climate policy within the United States, I have not often had the opportunity to engage with the international implications of the climate crisis. On a personal level, one of my top priorities for my time at COP28 has been to seek out and listen to the voices of those on the global frontline. I found many of those conversations around the “loss and damage” fund.

It’s become a truism in climate circles that those people who contributed the least to the climate crisis are being hit first and worst by the impacts. I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to hear directly from those people, whether they were residents of small island nations, indigenous communities, or marginalized communities. This is especially important as the COP tries to operationalize the loss and damage fund that pledged to transfer money to low-emission countries being wracked by extreme weather and other climate disasters that are fueled by the historical emissions of high emission countries.

One message I heard repeatedly that the lack of clear definitions around what constitutes “loss and damages” is a major barrier to implementing these provisions. This leaves several key questions unresolved. Can the fund only be used to pay for economic damages? What should be the methodology by which those damages are calculated? How do we account for non-economic harms such as losses of access to areas of cultural significance or ways of life? Who qualifies as a “developing country” entitled to receive these funds? The challenges of loss and damage also complicated by the wide range of climate disasters. Some events are rapid onset catastrophes, like a major hurricane or flooding. Other harms emerge much more slowly, such as lingering droughts that harm agricultural production. And of course, not every natural disaster can be directly attributed to climate.

A recurring theme from communities who would be the recipients of such funds was that any funding needs to be accessible to people on the ground. Where traditional aid can often be a burdensome process that imposes an outside idea of what needs are, they argued that what to do with loss and damage funding are decisions that should be left up to the local level. Ultimately, the work that needs to be done to adapt to climate disasters is ultimately local, and funds that aren’t accessible to those closest to the ground won’t have the impact that is needed.

Repeatedly, speakers from developing countries emphasized that loss and damage is not charity or aid, but instead are needed justice. One moving speaker, a poet and activist, lamented that vulnerable communities are “seen as casualties of inevitabilities” which serves to further erase their agency. Given all the powerful people speaking a lot at COP, often with little action to show for it, I was struck by her “in the time between when you speak to power and when power finally acts, we lose people.”

My first stop at COP28 was the United Nations Climate Change Global Innovation Hub. In figuring out which sessions I wanted to attend, I noticed the word “innovation” appearing again and again and thought it might be helpful to hear how an official UN pavilion was defining this buzzword in the initial events. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself listening to panels that seem to take an expansive view of the definition of “innovation” beyond just technological changes. The series of speakers each talked about the need to close the gap between what we think is possible and what is needed to avert the worst climate impacts. In their formulation this moment necessitates a reimagining of our all too often exploitive relationship with the natural world. “Either the future will be green or there will be no future.”

I asked the speakers how we break free from the limitations constraints that short term incentives, habits and practices in both political and business realms impose on human systems when trying to cope with a long-term challenge such as climate. In response, one speaker identified three truisms to keep in mind; 1) customers generally don’t want to pay more for things, 2) shareholders always want to make more money, and 3) politicians want to be reelected. Continuing, this presenter described past work in finding synergies between seemingly unrelated constituencies as a kind of “magic alchemy” to achieve unlikely breakthroughs, giving an example of how partnering with mobility activists on a campaign to increase public transit led to a successful campaign.

As a master’s student at the Sanford School of Public Policy, I was heartened to hear many speakers emphasize the importance policy. Policy is needed both to incentivizing the kinds of changes we want, while strong regulation is necessary to limit or eliminate activities that we find to be environmentally destructive and harmful to human health and flourishing. Of course, this is easier said than done, but these conversations did validate my decision to orient myself professionally to pursue climate solutions through public policy.

Another highlight of the day for me was a discussion in the Ocean Pavilion on the climate implications of plastics production and waste. After she spoke passionately about the need for a binding global treaty on plastics production and waste management, I was privileged to get to speak with Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program. She noted that materials that are precious (like oil) must have systems in place to recycle them and to eliminate unnecessary uses because they are ultimately finite. She shared how great deal of plastic waste is generated by cleaning products that used to be powder products are now sold as convenient products like liquid detergents. This reminded me to the opportunities that can be found in challenging the default practices that we’ve inherited and instead attempting to align of practices with the needs of the present and our aspirations for the future.