Author: Melissa Tier

If you’ve been following this blog and all that Alicia & Daniel have been up to this week (which has been a lot!!), you might now be wondering how the Swarthmore delegates choose which activities to pursue while at the conference. And if you haven’t thought about this, it’s worth considering just how massive this annual conference is and how many concurrent events there are at any given time!

At every COP, there are many types of events. Here’s a quick breakdown.

First, there’s the Blue Zone. This very, very large area (often several buildings) can only be accessed with an official badge.

The Swarthmore delegation has “observer” badges, while other people have “party” badges (which means they are officially part of a country’s negotiating team). Within the Blue Zone, observer delegates only have access to some of the various types of events. At the most formal level, there are plenaries and a number of types of negotiating sessions. Observer delegates can often attend plenaries and sometimes can attend negotiating sessions. However, observers were restricted from attending any of these events during the first two days of COP26 — with the reason given being that it was the World Leaders Summit (with many heads of state in attendance) and there were more restrictive quotas set due to COVID.

Still within the Blue Zone, there are also other events that are open to all badge types. Many if not most of these occur within pavilions, which are temporary structures rented by countries, NGOs, and others. Each pavilion has its own 2-week slate of events! Pavilions are quite substantial structures themselves, often with space for several dozen people. That said, the size (& therefore cost) of pavilions varies, and this is one of many ways in which there are disparities in access between countries (a bit more on that later).

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Another location where events in the Blue Zone occur is the Action Zone, which has the most informal & colorful feel of the space.

In addition to all of this, there is an entirely different area called the Green Zone. This venue is open to the public; badges are not needed. The Green Zone is about a 15 minute walk or short (electric) bus ride from the Blue Zone. We stopped by the Green Zone this morning and found it to be something like a massive, climate-focused science fair filled with dozens of hands-on science exhibitions and hundreds of local schoolchildren. There are also lectures and film screenings and other neat events occurring in side rooms of this venue. (I don’t have a great photo of the Green Zone yet, but will try to add one to this post soon!)

Finally, there are other big events, often protests, that occur outside of both zones. See here for some initial pictures from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2021/nov/03/cop26-finance-protest-and-indigenous-voices-in-pictures

While we’re talking about the COP venue, it’s worth mentioning that accessibility is a huge challenge — and is perhaps more so this year than ever before due to COVID. Challenges started even before COP26 began, with many delegations having a hard time planning for and then traveling to the UK because of vaccination disparities and the requirement of quarantine periods for unvaccinated delegates. (The UK offered to pay for vaccinations & quarantine hotels, but the process has been abysmal.) Another big challenge in planning is that there are limited flights to/from some locations, and so some delegates are needing to stay for abnormally long periods in the UK (or, of course, not coming at all).

There was also a lot of confusion leading right up to the first day of COP26 regarding how daily COVID testing would work. (It turns out we each have to take a rapid test every morning and then present results during our security check-in.) We’ve also heard that official party delegates who remain in quarantine (either because of post-travel requirements or because of several positive cases that have occurred) are having trouble accessing their negotiation sessions virtually because the online platform for delegates is quite terrible. Finally, actually getting inside of the Blue Zone has been a very slow process each morning — with sometimes a multi-hour wait standing in line outside.

As Daniel has mentioned, the Glasgow Climate Dialogues (and many others) have called for a UNFCCC action plan to increase accessibility at future COPs. Given the logistical missteps that have occurred this year, there is unfortunately a long way to go to achieve this extremely important goal.

If you’re following along with this blog, you might understand by now that there are many different parts to this absolutely huge conference. It’s almost like there are several different conferences going on: the actual negotiations (only some of which are open to observers like us), the official side events (which operate more like a traditional conference), tabling (small exhibit booths near the enormous eating area), and pavilions (more on these below). These different events can be quite far away from each other – it can take 20 minutes during crowded times to walk from one end of the conference center to the other. Also, there are two permanent buildings that house this COP, as well as a complex of temporary structures connecting the areas. I took the below picture right at the start of the temporary structures (which, by the way, are heated, lit, and ventilated) – you can see them extend for quite a ways.

The pavilions are located in the temporary structures. Many of them are hosted by countries, though also some NGOs and a few businesses. Most pavilions contain a seating area where the country/organization hosts its own full series of lectures and receptions. Here are pictures of just some of the pavilions – they can be very ornate! Take a look through and pay careful attention to what each group is choosing to highlight about itself.

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Austria

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Britain & Northern Ireland

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European Union

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Germany

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Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar*, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates)

Note: in 2017, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt cut diplomatic ties with Qatar. I’m unclear whether Qatar is still technically in the GCC, but as you’ll see below they actually had their own pavilion.

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IETA (The International Emissions Trading Association)

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India

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Indonesia

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Nordic countries

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Fiji & New Zealand

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Poland

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Qatar

As mentioned above, Qatar was not included in the GCC pavilion.

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Qazaqstan

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Russia

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Senegal

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South Africa

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South Korea

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Thailand

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Turkey

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WWF/#WeAreStillIn

The US does not have an official pavilion this year (take a wild guess why), but instead the #WeAreStillIn network borrowed the WWF “Panda Hub” for three or four days mid-COP. It looked to me like they actually repainted this wall!

  

On Wednesday, former US Vice President Al Gore spoke in one of the plenary rooms. Apparently he does this every year, and he didn’t present particularly novel information, but it was still very neat to see him up close.

Also fun was to be able to seat in the delegate seats. I ended up at the Kingdom of Lesotho. There was a bit of confusion around my seat halfway through the talk – delegates from Lesotho came to sit there, were surprised to find other people, and were told by a security guard before I fully understood what was going on that seating had been opened to all. Luckily, there was room for the delegates to sit down next to me and we had a friendly, whispered conversation about the famous Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth. They also shared the below flyer with me.

Back to Gore’s presentation, here are some extremely sobering and occasionally encouraging facts that he shared:

Above: The energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution is now “…equivalent to exploding 500,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year.” James Hansen, Former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Above: Graphic showing increased deviation (between 2005-2015) from the mean of the frequency of unusual temperature occurrences. Baseline is from (but I’m unsure because it’s blurry) 1951-1990. Graph shows in particular increased warmer than average days as compared to baseline. 

Above: One June 26-27, 2018, Quriyat, Oman set a world record for the hottest overnight low temperature ever recorded: 42.6C (108.7F). The town remained above 41.6C for 51 hours.

Above: The jet stream is becoming “wavier”. Steeper troughs and higher ridges mean weather systems progress more slowly, raising the chances for long-duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves.

Above: A recent national survey shows that 69% of Polish citizens favor a phaseout of coal by 2030.

Above: Enough solar energy reaches Earth every hour to fill all the world’s energy needs for a full year.

 

Planetary Boundaries

Speaking of famous white dudes, I also had a chance to see a brief presentation by Johan Rockstrom, a very well-known climate scientist who leads research on the ‘planetary boundaries’.

Rockstrom said that there are three key climate facts:

1. We are living in a new geological era, the Anthropocene.
2. The Holocene is the only period that we know for certain can support sustainable societies (i.e., meet the SDGs), so we need to get the Earth back to those characteristics.
3. However, ecosystems can be shifted irreversibly by breaching tipping points – and so we might not be able to get back to the Holocene.

The time to act must be now, he says – and the SDGs are the framework to use to get there. Finally, he advocates for people (researchers, policymakers, etc.) to not pick and choose SDGs to focus on, but instead to see them all as an inseparable package.

I study urban governance of climate change, so while at the COP I am focused on conversations regarding ‘sub-national’ and/or ‘non-state’ actors (to use common UNFCCC language), and in particular conversations regarding cities.

To some extent, city-level discussions are out of place at a UN conference, which hosts negotiations among federal government representatives. However, when it comes to addressing climate change, national-level negotiations may not be the most effective. Or rather, it would be “insufficient” – as one speaker said today – “to have a theory of change that relies exclusively on national governments.”

As of this year, the UN published data that over 55% of the global population now lives in urban areas, and this number is expected to still grow significantly over this century. One social scientist describes the modern age as blanketed in an “urban fabric”, such that all regions – cities or rural – are influenced by a globalized, urban-centric culture. A majority of the planet’s people, built infrastructure, and economic assets are based in cities. So cities are generally important to the modern world. But for all of the above reasons their involvement is also essential to achieving the goal of limiting planetary warming to 1.5C.

This fact is strongly recognized in side events at this year’s COP, though it seems to me it hasn’t quite reached the high-level negotiations. In these past two days, I have heard local representatives from many countries talk about successes in their cities, and how these changes are essential in order for their countries to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as committed to in the Paris Agreement.

There are other exciting developments in the works. The IPCC recognized a need for more research and data on cities, and so held the first CitiesIPCC conference in Canada this past March. Additionally, some of the scientists who wrote the IPCC Special Report on 1.5C also released (at a session yesterday! See picture below) a summary of the special report specifically written for urban policymakers.

Finally, novel networks have been developing within countries, such as: #WeAreStillIn in the US (which both Swarthmore College and Swarthmore Borough are signatories of), the Japan Climate Initiative, and Alianza para la Acción Climática in Argentina. I also learned today that there is a fairly new network of these networks, called the Alliances for Climate Action.

It will be a fascinating political science and climate policy-making question in the years to come as to how to incorporate such non-state actors (which include not just cities, but also businesses, higher ed, civil society, etc.) into international climate negotiations. There needs to be a place for them at the table, and this has the potential to shake up the standard practice of state-focused negotiations. As another speaker said today, it will only be via “constructive engagement” between state and non-state actors that we will be able to sufficiently “accelerate NDC implementation.”

As Betsy wrote yesterday, Swarthmore’s Week 2 delegation arrived in Poland yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. It’s been a whirlwind day and a half, with things sure to stay busy as the COP resumes tomorrow.

Day 1: Katowice

Yesterday evening, for our first event of the trip, Saadiq, Eriko, and I (Melissa) attended a dinnertime gathering hosted by Yale University. It was posh – with hors d’oeuvres and wine – and clearly intended to be a networking event. We chatted with undergraduate and graduate students with similar elite US university affiliations about their research and how they ended up at COP. Toward the end, three big-name speakers gave short speeches: Todd Stern (former US Special Envoy for Climate Change), Susan Biniaz (former Deputy Legal Adviser of the State Department – serving as lead climate lawyer), and Tom Steyer (philanthropist/environmentalist). If nothing else, it was a relatively familiar way (oh, academia) to ease into an otherwise overwhelming setting.

 

Day 2: Auschwitz

The COP was closed on Sunday, so we took the day to explore – splitting up for different activities. I went my own direction, leaving before sunrise to get to Auschwitz early (the others will go next Saturday). It was an appropriately horrible day: cold, with high winds and rain.

I booked an English-language, 3 hour tour of the remnants of the grounds. We spent about 2 hours at Auschwitz I, and then another hour at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The entire grounds is now a museum. I was moved to hear that it had opened in 1947 – at the request of survivors, some of whom also served as the museum’s first tour guides. That this experience is exactly what the survivors wanted of us made me even more motivated to go through with the visit, abhorrent as the place is.

Auschwitz I consists of many brick barracks, some of which have been refurbished for educational purposes. The tours are carefully designed to take visitors through a sequential program. First, we learned about the process that the Nazis put arrivals through: often after train rides in lethal conditions, Jews were distinguished from non-Jews, and ‘healthy’ Jews from ‘non-healthy’ Jews. Gentiles and healthy Jews went to the concentration camp, where they were likely to die from starvation or heavy labor. Non-healthy Jews (and children, elderly, pregnant women, etc.) were sent directly to the gas chambers. Next, we saw the sorted piles of the belongings of the massacred. Most Jews arriving at Auschwitz, many from other countries, had been led to believe that they were being relocated and had brought (with Nazi encouragement) bags of possessions. It wasn’t just material goods either; I cried in the room showcasing nothing but piles of hair. Finally, the tour of the first camp ends with an enforced silent walk-through of an intact gas chamber.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau is many times bigger than Auschwitz I. It is also less intact, partially because some barracks were made of wood, partially because the Nazis successfully destroyed much of it just prior to liberation. The several gas chambers, for example, were reduced to rubble. At this camp we also saw in more detail the standard living quarters (such as they were), specifically for women.

After the camps, I went directly to a Jewish museum nearby. It is one of the few representations of Jewish culture in the area, and served as something of a balm. The museum also answered a growing question of mine: why does Poland not seem to have a resurgent Jewish population, when in the early 20th century it was so huge? The answer is that anti-semitism did not end with liberation, and many Jews who initially returned home after the war soon left due to continued pogroms. But still, for this museum to exist there was a reassurance that the long history of Galician Jewish culture has not been completely erased.

This is only an extremely brief reflection on this experience – a pilgrimage of sorts for this Ashkenazi. Auschwitz is a name from my childhood nightmares, a hell that so many of us have imagined ourselves trapped in. But until planning for this trip, it was not one that I ever imagined actually physically stepping foot in.

I know this isn’t directly related to the COP, but I hope you’ll agree that it’s immensely important. Certainly other COP attendees did, because it was clear that hundreds of people made the same decision today to make the trip down from Katowice. We’ll go into this second week of the conference with, perhaps, a reminder of the devastation that humans are capable of inflicting on each other. We’d do well not to forget, so that protection of the vulnerable might be woven into the fabric of these negotiations.