On COP28 and Enchanting Contradictions

By Alexandra Cronin

Entrance to Expo City.

I began this post on the eve of my first COP in the equal spirits of awe and skepticism. Every COP is an enchanting contradiction, I am told. Here, the UNFCCC plots a trajectory for course correction from the shadow of a combustion engine in the shape of a city. On arrival, a cab ferried me along an arterial highway fourteen lanes deep, threading through desert overlain with golf courses. I am not exempt from contradictions either, traveling by air alongside some eighty-four thousand others; by week’s end, the two planes that carried me from Boston and Dubai had emitted 4.7 tons of CO2.

At the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly, the President-Designate of COP28, Sultan Al-Jaber, said that he had attended twelve COPs, and that each of them was an incremental success story. While I respect optimism in climate action, “realistic” incrementalism is, to me, the last recourse of the imaginatively bankrupt. In climate action, incrementalism is a failure of optimism, which is the ability to imagine oneself or one’s species into the future. Incrementalism is three unconscionable degrees of warming.

Under an incrementalist regime, it would not surprise me to learn that, by 2050, humankind had satisfied itself with an uninhabitable planet. Incrementalism is pernicious. In twenty-seven years, one generation will have come and one will have gone, and human baselines for our planetary normal will have shifted deeper into unrecoverable territory. Our partial human memories are precisely why we create institutions: to encode in law or in custom the knowledge that would otherwise dilute with time. For these same reasons, institutions are also resistant to change. I have a great deal of faith in peoples’ transformative capacity and only sporadic faith in institutions’.

Members of the Tufts delegation: Aarushi Aggarwal, Selena Wallace, Alyssa Scheiner, Shubhangi Thakur, and Alexandra Cronin.

The immediacy of news at COP28 meant that many panels were broadcast over Zoom, and any press releases we attended in person were published in summary only minutes later, so for me, the value of in-person attendance lay in witnessing—and demystifying—the institution as well as the mechanics of international climate negotiations. No amount of coursework can fully prepare you for the first attempt at navigating a conference of this scale. I spent much of the first day orienting myself on foot, determining where to position myself in a landscape almost as novel to long-time COP attendees as it was for me. In our very first Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) briefing, we were told that this was the most restrictive COP (access-wise) since “the dark ages of the Paris Agreement” and that access to formal negotiations had not been guaranteed to any of the constituencies. Where guaranteed, negotiation attendance would be allotted via a ticketing system, such that RINGO (the UNFCCC’s second largest constituency) could only send one or two observers to a given negotiation per day. Briefing organizers also acknowledged that Expo City Dubai was physically larger than any of their previous COPs’ venues, and the cumulative miles we walked from one pavilion to another also hindered accessibility, requiring careful time budgeting and an acquired sense of direction.

Given the barriers to observing formal negotiations, members of our delegation spent most of our time in panels, country pavilions, and plenary sessions, when we were not entreating the security guards to admit us into informal negotiations. Over the course of the week, I spent more and more time observing these informal sessions. Though rarely substance-oriented, the legalistic parsing of language highlighted sticking points in the many incomplete drafts to emerge from the COP, providing insights into the formal negotiations, e.g.: the perennial debate over the merits of “shall” versus “will,” which were subsequently downgraded to “may”; the farcical discussion of whether “just transition” required the word “just” to be explicit; the gradual slippage of “fossil fuel phase out,” which was ultimately displaced by the half-heartedly celebrated phrase, “phase down,” and so on.

Beyond the UNFCCC and Presidency-organized events were the semi-concentric rings of blue- and green-zone pavilions and the single pocket of approved space for protestors. From press coverage, these daily protests appear sprawling and well-attended, though in reality, small groups of activists were corralled in a thirty-or-so foot square space. Further afield, thought leaders converged around hastily constructed thematic pavilions, where the traffic of many hundreds of attendees triggered a chorus of groans from floorboards overhead and underfoot. To hear speakers in the more popular pavilions, many would drag their chairs closer to the panelists, cinching the audience into a tighter space and engendering louder groans from the overtaxed buildings.

Members of the Tufts delegation: Alyssa Scheiner, Selena Wallace, and Alexandra Cronin.

Amid the questionable architecture, however, were vibrant hubs of multilingual panels and converging research interests. Given my studies of environmental peacebuilding and water governance, I was drawn to events pertaining to water conflict and cooperation, especially where those themes overlapped with renewable energy generation. At each water event, speakers reiterated their dismay that water was not formally included in negotiations, given its capacity to bridge discussions of mitigation and adaptation in the GST and GGA. Water, it was frequently said, should be at the center of climate change litigation, and transboundary water cooperation has the capacity to make climate change cooperation more effective by enlarging joint planning areas and sharing costs of mitigation and adaptation measures. International transboundary freshwaters account for 60% of total river flow, and this collaborative vision of riparians endeavoring to extend successful freshwater arrangements to climate suggests water’s value as a peace dividend. While I happen to agree with this framing, it is worth noting that each thematic panel I attended, whether water-related or not, made claims to centrality. Such a strategy is perhaps necessary when lobbying for inclusion in high-level negotiations, but if everything is a central or underlying issue, then everything is on the table for debate. Some presenters acknowledged their concern that COPs have become too broad in scope to function but maintained that their research interest would bring structure to an unwieldy international instrument.

If I have learned anything from living through a pandemic, it is that the allure of “business as usual” often outweighs calls for transformation, even under conditions of rapid change. Like the pandemic, climate change requires multiscalar, multinational coordination among agents who “seemed to expect that something should be struck out by one or the other to remove their embarrassments and reduce their expenditure, without involving the loss of any indulgence of taste or pride” (Persuasion, which I re-read recently and which felt apt during COP). As I enter my final semester at Fletcher and decide where I would like to stand in the landscape of the climate crisis, I am inordinately grateful for having had the opportunity to witness this event. At times contradictory, at others poignant and awe-inspiring in its scale, COP has reinvigorated my belief in the urgency of transformative rather than incremental change and left me with questions that I anticipate untangling over the course of my career.

Flags at COP28.

Alexandra Cronin is a MALD student at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.