Author: Dylan Moore

Since arriving back in the US on Thursday, I’ve now had a couple days to process the COP28 decision and my experience there. I’ve been trying to hold space for contradictory ideas about the Conference simultaneously in my mind.

Monitoring the media and engaging in my conversations with peers, the negotiated outcome of this COP starts to look like a Rorschach test, where the perception of success or failure says as much about a person as the text itself can. My conversations with CVF fellows all identified the operationalization of the L&D fund as a key indicator of success of this agreement. Others mentioned the GGA text, with some asserting that the final text was disappointingly weak on financing and equity (with too little emphasis on “common but differentiated responsibilities”), yet others celebrated the successful adoption after so many years of being sidelined. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel language dominated in more mainstream media and amongst my peers, again with quite bifurcated views on that outcome as either mealy-mouthed, weak or as a historic reckoning and “beginning of the end” of fossil fuels.

I have yet to fully internalize my personal emotions about the negotiated outcome, but my experience at COP was also a vivid reminder that while the negotiated outcome may draw most of our attention, there are two additional aspects through which we ought to judge the success of each COP. The annual act of multilateralism and the convening of the global network of people who descend on each COP are, in my opinion, important to celebrate as wins, despite the flaws of any negotiated text.

As I walked around COP, I found myself reflecting on how the diversity of the world represented at the conference, concentrated in one geographic space, exposes deep tensions between competing political systems (democracies, autocracies), incompatible ontologies (Do you nature as something we have dominion over, something we must be stewards of, or something we are in reciprocal relationship with?), and different economic realities and visions for the future. Obviously, there are huge disparities in power and in who is truly represented in the diplomatic negotiations:

• Who’s allowed to sit at the table as parties, and who gets relegated to guerilla lobbying in the halls.
• Which countries have multiple negotiators tracking every issue and which have one person tracking multiple workstreams.
• Who can pay for a flight to Dubai (or pay for dozens of lobbyists to go) and who is stuck in their home country.

And yet despite all that, the Conference is annual attempt to bring the representatives of nearly all of world’s peoples together to address a common problem. This means countries engaged in hot and conflict, in great power competition, who otherwise might deny each other diplomatic recognition, and those offering a fiery rebuke of their peer nations’ ideologies all sit in the same space, follow common bureaucratic procedures, and agree to do something. Even when that something is weak, the act of coming together in negotiation is worth celebrating, preserving, protecting. Peace and cooperation, no matter how imperfect, are precious and fragile commodities necessary for global change.

COP also creates this annual locus of attention and activity that brings tens of thousands of people together from across the world and from across so many different approaches to the act of global transformation in response to climate change. The volume and quality of relationships formed, knowledge transferred, and empathy fostered (between activists, youth, businesses, government actors, nonprofits, IO workers, and so many others) within two weeks is truly remarkable, and I feel privileged and grateful to have made the connections I did this prior week and have been folded into networks of social and economic transformation that I didn’t even know existed before coming to COP. It will be through these connections that “niche innovations” proliferate across geographies and expand out of their niches to drive systems change.

So was this COP outcome a success? I don’t know.

I think the answer hinges upon 1) our ability to preserve the process of multilateralism year after year, 2) the preservation and diversification of our networks of connections made at each COP, and 3) the ability to synthesize all of that together to interpret whatever diplomatic outcome may arise with the highest urgency and greatest ambition. After all, language—even flowery, complex, diplomatic—is still just a tool to facilitate cooperative action. In that context, I see the words of the text as a whisper in the global conversation. But in every whisper lies the seeds of a roar. Each whisper is an idea made real, with the hope of being echoed and amplified, a nascent opportunity to reinforce or reshape human action. So the success or failure of the text depends on how we individually and collectively use it in our countries and our communities.

– Dylan Moore

I’m processing a wave of emotions from this second to last day of COP28. This began in the afternoon with the power and uplift of People’s Plenary, crescendoed with bearing witness to a 12 year old climate activist call for an “end to fossil fuels for our planet and for our futures” as she disrupted a High-Level discussion of the COP27 and 28 Presidencies, then slowly crashed down with the Presidency’s release of the weakened (though not unexpectedly) Global Stocktake text that had dropped fossil fuel phaseout language. My day concluded with the slow bureaucratic process of the final plenary session, marking the beginning of the ending of this COP, with the Parties agreeing to several agenda items, including the formal announcement of Azerbaijan—conspicuously marketed in the announcement video as a “land of peace”—as host of COP29.

As I’ve been reflecting today on the negotiations and trying to grasp the progress of the text over the previous few days, my mind keeps bouncing between the incredible flexibility and internal contradictions introduced by the “creative ambiguity” of diplomatic language, which pushes me further into reexamination of foundational ideas about the nature of language as a tool for social communication, and how this relates to power and cooperation. 

We are forced to grapple with the reality that every act of language-based communication is tied to corresponding acts of interpretation. I have a mental model that I try to translate into language that then is heard by you and then approximated into a unique model in your mind. The solution is for both people to share a language, because if words had immutable and mutually-agreed upon meanings, there would not be any risk of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. If we have sufficiently shared context, then your approximation of my meaning is close enough to the model I began with. And as such, we can engage in shared and coordinated action via shared from that understanding. I talk, you listen, we act. But that of course, is too often not how communication goes.

Even if we ostensibly share a language, shared language hardly seems sufficient for genuine understanding, because that assumes a stable and shared view of words and their meanings. Misunderstandings necessarily arise during communication because each of us is using distinct words—even if they look or sound identical—with unique meanings. Words have slightly different meanings depending on who’s involved in the communication. 

To add further complication for the purposes of multilateral diplomacy, what happens when we add multiple actors or introduce non-native speakers or listeners who must rely on internal or external processes of translation and interpretation before they arrive at understanding? During multiple capacity building sessions I’ve attended here at COP, I’ve heard various negotiators and policymakers from the Global South express some version of the sentiment that “translation is not enough” for them to engage effectively in negotiating or implementing the decisions of the UNFCCC. Each called for greater cultural or social contextualization of the diplomatic language, both from the bottom-up and top-down, in order to make climate action more effective at cutting emissions and reflective of the desires or needs of these communities. 

Two days ago in a negotiation session on the Mitigation Work Program, I was desperately writing down notes trying to capture the brackets, deletions, and additions to the draft, but also the mood and general sentiments of each Party’s position. Through that experience, in particular, I started to see this strange form of very particular communication that we call multilateral diplomacy as a strange and delicate balancing act of trying to create enough shared context such that the definitions and language are enough for cooperative action (which is why Australia and other wanted certain historic references added to the preamble and specific examples listed in the operational paragraphs), but also that this context also remains just vague, opaque, and unstructured enough to allow for sufficient linguistic ambiguity (as exemplified by China and the KSA’s calls to strike roughly half the text) to allow the various Parties in that negotiated space to retain integrity to some underlying values, identities, or national priorities.

If the diplomatic text is too linguistically clear, there can be no consensus. If it’s too vague, there can be no coordinated or meaningful action. Through that lens, I now see the Paris Agreement as this miraculous and yet (thus far) woefully inadequate innovation in communication that has helped to create sufficient shared understanding between disparate global actors to bend the emissions trajectory from a +3.6 to +4.2°C down to a 2.5ish°C path. 

Earlier this evening, Sultan Al Jaber, the COP President, called upon the Parties here to emulate the success of Paris:

“Together we have the opportunity to deliver history again. We can send a signal to the world that multilateralism does work, and this process can respond to what the science is telling us, that it can deliver for the most vulnerable and keep 1.5 within reach.” 

My worry is that as the science on our climate future gets even clearer, the decarbonization options and timelines get further compressed (as shown in the GST), and the necessary space for the linguistic flexibility that underpins diplomatic communication as I’ve described gets eliminated, and the likelihood of global cooperation to reach net zero will get that much smaller.

Will this COP rescue a firm call for a “fossil fuel phaseout/phase down” in the next 24 hours? Or is such language too unambiguous for multilateral diplomacy to work?

I just touched down in Dubai and am excited to where week two of the Conference goes. While here, I will be supporting the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), an international partnership of Global South countries that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work with the CVF on their Capacity Building Fellowship as they prepared for the negotiations in Bonn and COP28.

Coming into the Conference, I am helping track three key negotiating priorities for CVF: the Loss and Damage fund, Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), and the inclusion of fossil fuel phaseout/down language in the final agreement.

The parties seemed to reach an early agreement on a Loss and Damage fund, with several pledges for initial capitalization of the fund. I was somewhat surprised at how quickly that item was agreed to, especially since the amount pledged with the announcement of fund totaled only about $700 million, a fraction of the estimated annual costs already being imposed on LMICs by the impacts of climate change.

The second area I will be watching is the development of the Global Goal on Adaptation framework. From my conversations with CVF, this seems to be their top priority at this COP, as many of CVF countries are already facing droughts, floods, crop failures, and myriad other impacts that their populations need to become more resilient and adapt to, but often lack the capacity, technology, and/or financing for adaptation. However, the negotiations on how to adaptation goals, targets, and accountability mechanisms sometimes seem to move even slower than those on mitigation. In principle, mitigation is quite simple to define, whereas adaptation to climate change can, in theory, encompass everything from migration to building seawalls and more.

A draft text of the GGA was released yesterday, and while there seemed to be general agreement on the topline goal, many other areas were bracketed (meaning they were still under negotiation). A target quantification of the adaption finance gap, referring to the difference between the costs of adaptation and the availability of financing to meet those needs, was included in the draft GGA text but still bracketed, indicating that there is still disagreement on its inclusion.

I am excited to hear more about the state of play at the CVF briefings in the coming days. I also am looking forward to meeting several of the negotiators and youth delegates who went through the Fellowship and hear their impressions of COP28 and these negotiating tracks thus far. For many of them, this is also their first-time attending COP and they have backgrounds in activism or local governments. As someone who’s primary introduction to climate policy started at the local level, then at the US federal level, conference diplomacy still feels so opaque. I’m curious to witness the process and excited to see how it contrasts with those my earlier experiences in local and federal climate politics.