Representation and Agitation: Critical inside and outside the walls of COP25

By Becca Wolfson

Becca Wolfson posing in the conference hall, IFEMA - Feria de Madrid.

Understanding carbon markets is not my full time job or focus of my studies. As a part-time student in the Tufts Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning Masters program and full-time executive director of the Boston Cyclists Union, I am focused on human-centered transportation and bringing down the tyranny of the car. With urbanization increasing globally at a steady clip, transportation has become a leading cause of carbon emissions in most developed countries, and most are plagued with crippling traffic congestion as well. So, I was thrilled to get to attend COP25 in Madrid to get a pulse of what is [and isn’t] happening globally with respect to transportation and addressing our climate crisis.

I attended every session I could find relating to transportation – only about one a day for the week I was there (with more on “Transportation Day,” a half-day of panels and discussions focused on transportation help by SLoCaT, hosted in the Chilean pavilion on the first Friday). In the scheme of things, there were not many sessions and many were quite similar, recycling the panelists and experts from one speaking event to the next. What I took was this: of all of the people working in the realm of sustainable transportation, not a single one was satisfied with the scope of policy efforts on the table when it comes to transportation systems change.

To many people’s frustration, the majority of policy interventions with respect to transportation are still focused on electrification. This has been a criticism of mine for a long time; I was hoping to learn about more ambitious targets and policies at COP25. Instead, most of the panels I went to were framed around electrification of our transportation system.

Two young women present during “Transportation Day” in the Chilean Pavilion. They reveal that cars – single occupancy vehicles and most often SUVs – have contributed the most and greatest increase in CO2 emissions in the transportation sector between 2010 and 2018.

I was happy to see push back by audience members and panelists themselves that this is a flaw of the transportation debate. Mohamed Mezghani, Secretary General of the International Association of Public Transportation (UITP) noted, “In these discussions, these articles, the transportation discussion relies on electrification. If we electrify a bus and it’s still stuck in traffic, it doesn’t move more people.” And Sergio Avelleda, Directory of Urban Mobility at WRI, remarked, “if we just replace empty diesel buses with empty battery-powered buses, we haven’t solved anything. We need to make systems more attractive, better.” Additionally, every time electrification was brought up, panelists or participants were diligent in raising the issues of exacerbating climate, water, and land security from the resource extraction needed to create lithium batteries. This is not a conversation that is taking place in most of the conversations I’ve heard in North America, proving that representation matters.

During a transportation panel in the Germany pavilion, a panelist sheds light on the fact that in G20 countries, four times more money is invested in roadways than trains.

I was very pleased to find that the vast majority of city officials, consultants, planners, and policy-makers -- mainly from Europe and Latin America -- who spoke on panels at transportation events I attended said that the solution to our transportation woes is getting people out of single occupancy vehicles and onto transit, buses and bicycles. Innovators need not apply: we have the technology and the knowledge of the infrastructure that carries those modes. Now we simply need the investment and political will to re-prioritize more egalitarian buses, bicycles and trains at the “expense” of the automobile.

An argument you can’t ignore: children – like the two suspended from this highway overpass during the Climate March in Madrid – are furious that they will inherit a world irreversibly impacted by climate change, especially if we continue on the projected path.

To force these investments and shift in political wills, we NEED to to a better job at creating urgency, at shaping the debate, at calling out political leaders’ hypocrisy and shortcomings. That’s something I was very grateful to experience at COP25 – I left completely inspired by the youth activists and indigenous leaders who I saw shaping and changing public discourse through the course of their activism during COP25. You could not turn on a [progressive/liberal] media source during the two weeks of COP25 and not hear about Greta Thunberg or indigenous youth activists, and other indigenous people who traveled to Spain from South America, Central America, Canada and beyond to put together their Climate Chart and delver it to the COP25 presidency. They peacefully protested inside and outside conference halls. One of the biggest climate marches in history took place in Madrid on the first Friday of COP25, bringing 500,000 people to the streets to demand urgency in addressing climate change.

We transportation activists and advocates need to learn from climate activists and get better at elevating the social, economic, and health costs of not fixing our broken transportation system – and also recognize that we are not different. We need to do a better job of understanding all social issues and how interconnected they all are, and how to be better advocates with and for one another.

Indigenous youth peacefully protest in the COP25 conference hall, demanding action to protect indigenous people, their land and their rights, and calling out the inadequacy of Article 6, among other things.

If the climate negotiations are going to continue to be the framework for setting emission reduction targets and holding countries accountable to meet those goals, transportation has to be a more significant part of the policy agenda. Transportation needs its own targets and its own ambitious goals, since it is the one sector that is ruining all progress, in almost every corner of the globe. Next year, as the organizers and panelists of “Transportation Day” called for, I hope that Transport Ministers and other leaders are brought to the table during COP26.  And, I hope that we transportation advocates show up with the energy of the climate activists I witnessed this year to push for the needed ambition, to get the media and public on our side, because it will be required to create a comprehensive change to fix our transportation system that inequitably contributes to climate change. Our collective future depends on it.

Becca Wolfson 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/.