COP 25: Exhaustion and Resilience
By Carolyn House
Co-Facilitators Hugh Sealy and Peer Stiansen during Week 1 Article 6 Informals
As students of climate change, we learn about the exhaustion of natural resources. We aim to make resiliency a pillar of our responses to climate change. As students of negotiation, we see the personification of both exhaustion and resilience in the COP delegates.
“Many of you know me as a happy, friendly person” began Hugh Sealy, of Barbados Co-Facilitator of the Article 6 informal negotiations on voluntary climate finance. “Many people in this room are like family. But I have lost my patience.” He passed the mic to Co-Facilitator Peer Stiansen of Norway in order to take a moment for himself.
Carolyn House with COP 25 gear, exploring country pavilions.
Through Tufts’ role as a registered as a research organization, the university was able to send a small group to observe the negotiation with U.N. “blue zone” permission passes. This meant that we could witness the informal negotiations in real-time, and Article 6 has become a point of contention for the negotiators. I sat in at the end of the first week of negotiations, after many “informal- informal” negotiations, parties emerge from their closed events to coordinate decisions. (See this article for a quick summary on the points of contention with regards to Article 6, and this reflection by the Chair of the SBSTA Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, for more information.
Catching glimpses of the world of negotiators as they slog through language, debating down to the bracket, attempting to slide “as applicable” in to the end of every sub-clause, is unique. Largely, even from the blue zone, we observers buzz around like worker bees with no idea who many of our colleagues are. To come back to this arena year after year must be daunting.
GEF and GCF Gender and Green Finance Panel, Day 1.
Optimism comes easier the first few days. The sheer quantity of actors, events, and articulated goals is overwhelming and impressive.
By the last day, it seemed that people with better and better resumes would reach the same podium and conclusion: “the time for ideas has passed, it’s time for action.”
Discussion on development, facilitated by pastor, including representatives of Indigenous Peoples from Amazon Basin at the IDB Group Pavilion.
It is easy to feel exasperated, but challenging to come up with a way to solve this. How else are we to build consensus to battle global threats? Would it be better to take a higher risk approach, and perhaps allow imprudent action in order to get more results to report?
And yet, something else marked this conference: social resistance. The trip to Spain was redirected
from Chile because of the impact of protests and resulting police violence. Strikes in France led to three flight changes during my exit: what does this say about the world we live in?
Carolyn House with Jordan Harris: President of Adapt Chile, Former Supervisor, COP 25 Organizer liaison with Chilean Government.
As I hurried out of the pavilion on my last day, I ran into my supervisor from Adapt Chile, Jordan Harris. I first met Jordan during my undergraduate research at Tufts, studying resiliency and water resources in Chile. Through The Fletcher School, where I am currently a student, I received funding to work with his NGO this past summer and prepare for COP 25 in Santiago. I worked with NRDC Latin America on Green Infrastructure.
Carolyn House with Tufts Ph.D. in engineering Ifeanyi Mbah, practicing our negotiation tactics at higher education networking event.
The COP was hugely disorienting for me. According to my research, Chile’s salmon industry is taking a massive toll on the marine environment. Why, then, were they championed as the country that made COP 25 “blue” by bringing the issue of oceans to the forefront? Why is it that many Nature-Based Solutions (the more contemporary term for Green Infrastructure) is largely targeted at rural and forested areas in the south of Chile, when the payoff in Santiago, Chile’s largest urban center, would be much greater? My summer research helped me determine that many costs are not accounted for in Santiago, meaning that the argument behind NBS implementation in the city is missing a great deal of data. I felt fortunate to have enough personal experience to challenge the information around me, but frustrated with the lack of clarity behind resource allocation.
Like Hugh Sealy, I had to take a few deep breaths during various presentations. It is in this discomfort that I gained my biggest takeaway from COP 25: there should, by definition, be more questions than answers in life. A key part of understanding climate change, its ramifications, and a resilient future is simply getting folks together to ask the right questions. It’s getting the people who will get frustrated and get motivated in the room with scientists. Something must materialize outside of the COP: the private sector, regional actors, and civil society may need to form smaller engines to take action. Professor Kelly Sims Gallagher’s work that recommends increasing smaller, multilateral agreements seems particularly useful now that I have witnessed the negotiations.
COP 25 will leave each participant and observer with its own mark. Next year, 2020, is looming on the horizon with large commitment deadlines and the year of the ocean laying out an agenda of breathtaking proportions: but we cannot miss what has happened around us. Adults cannot afford the feeling of helplessness that tends to carry us away as teenagers like Time’s Person-Of-The-Year Greta Thunberg and her peers lead the way through civil resistance.
Carolyn House was a Tufts delegate to COP25 made possible by the Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE). Should you be affiliated with Tufts University and interested in being a Tufts delegate to COP in future years, please visit: https://environment.tufts.edu/initiatives/events/unfccc-cop/.