Alright, so the whole “regular blogs” thing didn’t quite work out.
Turns out, being at COP is BUSY. (Having zero internet at your accommodation and starting a new job the moment you come back doesn’t exactly help either…).
But it will surprise no one to know I still have More Things To Say about this experience. So now I’m home and a bit more rested, I’m going to try and use this blog to process some of my thoughts about the craziness of the last few weeks. These will probably be a bit more on concepts rather than events, but I promise they will make more sense than any words I could write a week ago!
As I write this, the world is waiting to see when these negotiations will actually finish and what they might achieve. I’d say they are waiting with bated breath, but honestly, expectations are pretty low right now. Small signs of progress have been creeping through at points throughout the afternoon, but as the clock ticks past the Friday 6pm deadline, this COP is a long way from a successful outcome.
Scrolling through my Twitter feed, it seems like this is the moment when people suddenly start to think about the humans behind the headlines. Whatever document can be put together, whatever commitments and compromises are being made, it ultimately comes down to a few hundred diplomats. At this stage, they will be exhausted.
It seems an obvious thing to say, but one of my major takeaways from COP26 has been realising there are people involved. Not abstract concepts like “governments”, or “observers”, or “negotiators” but complex human beings.
Being able to talk to some of these people within this space has been such a privilege. Because of this, one of the (unexpected!) early highlights from the whole experience was…
*wait for it*
The queue.
Bear with me. If you’ve been following the news reports over the past couple of weeks, you might have seen a lot of coverage in the first few days about the scrum to get into the Blue Zone itself. Along with the world’s media, you may have seen the pictures of the little girl staying in a hotel overlooking thousands of disgruntled delegates who waved and held up a sign saying “save our planet”.
What you won’t have seen is the value of that queue. There’s something very unifying about queuing with strangers for an hour: everyone is cold, everyone is a bit frustrated but (in this case) every single person around you is extremely interesting. With that in mind, striking up conversation has never been so easy. Sure, I was slightly disappointed the first time to find that the most international queue of my life, the person standing next to me happened to be from Bristol (!), but that’s OK.
In those first few hours each day, I spoke to:
A campaigns coordinator from the Czech Republic on how different conditions for civil society and protests are there, how difficult it is to lobby the right-wing government and the general sense of public opinion around climate. She was also talking the complexities of measuring “pre-industrial” levels for NDCs in a post-communist context.
An activist who (according to himself, at least) brought Extinction Rebellion to Israel, and has worked in marine biology for decades. He was pretty disparaging about the UNFCCC process and any potential outcome for COP, so I asked him where he found hope. He found this in the progress made in marine conservation in the Mediterranean since he started working, which appeared to be way beyond what he had imagined when he set out.
·The Director of an organisation working in Israel who knew the XR guy, but who had spent a long time running a water conservation project on River Jordan, who worked with Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians(!). He was interested to see that our badges were from faith organisations, as that project encompasses a major interfaith element. This ended up one of a number of surprising conversations I had with people who had interacted with (inter)faith actors in their work on climate.
A delegate from PNG, who was an expert on solar but keen to talk about the deforestation commitment of the first few days. I ran into him a few days later and asked him about the mood behind the doors closed to me as an observer. His response? People get that this is urgent. They know that this needs to be done and it needs to be done now. Some countries are very good at blocking things, but in general, the delegates and negotiators are in full agreement with those standing outside the Blue Zone calling for immediate action.
No blog is going to be able to do justice that queue. I take hope from realising that those surprising and unexpected conversations were probably reproduced thousands of times over in those first few days, as attendees found themselves having to speak to people that they otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to. As the world waits tonight, and as it digests the outcomes over next few weeks, I hope it remembers that these are people.
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