Author: Brittni Teresi

Today was intergenerational youth day at the conference! While themed days don’t affect the actual negotiation discussions too much, they do make it so that more of the side events at the conference center on this topic.

One event I went to for intergenerational youth day was a celebration for a new Guinness World Record of 100,000 climate change postcards put on a Swiss glacier. The celebration took the form of a panel in which NGO youth leaders from Uganda, India, and Switzerland discussed how they encouraged schools and youth organizations to write postcards against climate change, which were eventually put on a receding Swiss glacier to advocate that youth deserve a future too.

Personally, I felt a little skeptical about the initiative. While I absolutely think it’s inspirational that youth are speaking out against climate change, I questioned if there were too many negative impacts of putting postcards on the glacier. I wonder if school children would have felt as engaged if the postcards were sent to policymakers instead. I also found it a little sad when Switzerland said they had a hard time getting schools and youth organizations to join onto the initiative, as this is the reason they reached out to Uganda, India, and other countries to get more postcards in the first place. I wonder if the engagement of young children in the climate change movement may be lacking. Perhaps we could be doing more in schools to teach children the urgency of climate change. While this may seem a little far from the goal of the actual negotiations in implementing a rule book for the Paris agreement, it has potential to have similar importance in the future.

I think this is the first side event at the conference I attended where I was left feeling a little disheartened, or a little unsure about the impact of a supposed climate action. I was also left feeling like a lot more needs to be done in educating young children about the importance of climate change. I’d actually be really curious to hear others thoughts on this issue, if anyone has any reactions.

 

Despite warnings that the side events at COP24 tend to be more interesting than most of the actual negotiations, my decision this morning was to attend both an informal and a formal negotiation meeting. The first negotiations meeting I attended was an informal conversation with the SBSTA (Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice) about the timeline countries should have to implement the rule book for carrying out the Paris Agreement. They were discussing whether countries should have 5 years, 10 years, or the ability to decide their own timeline.

I definitely see why people say the meetings can be difficult to sit through. There was a lot of jargon and sometimes tedious arguments that seemed a little trivial if you weren’t part of the United Nations (EX: one delegate from a country spoke about a small phrase in paragraph 5 of Article 4 that needed to be deleted.)

Still, I am so happy I spent time this morning orienting myself with a negotiations meeting. It was SO interesting to watch how a United Nations meeting works in practice. Basically, countries take turns raising placards with their country’s name on it when they want to speak.

Most countries seemed to support implementing a 5 year timeline for the Paris Rule book. The Marshall Islands and South Africa advocated strongly for this. But, the timeline decision is more complicated than it sounds because no one is sure when the 5 year deadline should be implemented, especially since there is no rule book yet. The informal meeting was more of a discussion with countries raising their arguments and voting to see what is agreed upon, but no official policies were adopted.

Afterward, I contrasted the informal meeting with a formal negotiations meeting about climate finance. As Chris mentioned in his post, it was interesting to watch South Africa get pretty heated. The formal negotiations meeting was a lot more structured, had more strictly imposed time limits, and seemed a lot more tense than the informal negotiations session. I wonder how the atmosphere in both informal and formal negotiations will change on certain issues, especially as sessions progress and the stakes become higher throughout the next two weeks.

All of us students started out our day attending the COP24 opening ceremony, in which the Polish president, the mayor of Katowice, the leader of the World Bank, the prime minister of Fiji, and other high level officials spoke to the importance of COP24 and what it needs to accomplish.  The opening plenaries made clear the main goals of COP24: to create a rule book for implementing the Paris Agreement and to ramp up climate action efforts. Many leaders cited the IPCC report as evidence that climate action efforts need to be taken seriously.

The President of the World Bank made some bold commitments in their opening speech, such as including climate change as a factor in all of their decision making, implementing a shadow price on carbon, and doubling their budget toward mitigating climate change. I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be a huge initial reaction to these commitments, so I’m hoping to hear more about them throughout the conference.

(Executive Officer of the World Bank, Kristalina Georgieva.)

The president of Poland also used the opening plenaries as an opportunity to share what Poland has been doing to combat climate change and why Katowice is a great city to host COP24. He explained how the conference center where COP24 is being held is in the same site as a shut down coal mine. Amos, Shauna, Marianne, and I debated whether or not the Polish President’s argument was convincing, as he did make a good case for how Poland has been reducing emissions. Still, many of these reductions have still come from a supposedly ‘cleaner’ coal, and many climate activists would agree that clean coal is not really possible.

The opening plenaries raised many issues I can’t wait to follow throughout the conference!

(President of Poland, Andrzej Duda.)