Swarthmore at COP30

Would you cross the road if there was a one-in-three chance you’d be hit by a bicycle?  (Maybe.)  Would you cross the street, holding the hand of a child, if there was a one-in-three chance you’d be hit by a bus?  (Probably not.)

I’ll bet that the above questions grabbed your attention more than this would:

Limiting the warming caused by anthropogenic CO₂ emissions alone with a probability of … >66% to less than 2°C since the period 1861–1880, will require cumulative CO₂ emissions from all anthropogenic sources to stay between … 0 and about 1000 GtC (3670 GtCO₂) since that period. These upper amounts are reduced to about… 790 GtC (2900 GtCO₂) … when accounting for non-CO₂ forcings as in RCP2.6. An amount of 515 [445 to 585] GtC (1890 [1630 to 2150] GtCO₂), was already emitted by 2011.

The latter is a quote from the “Summary for Policymakers” in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   The former is an example of how to communicate essentially the same idea in a different way, focusing on the 1/3 risk of surpassing 2° C even with the quoted emissions budget, and how extreme and dangerous that would be.  The example comes from Keith Tuffley, one of the speakers at a very interesting session I attended on Monday.  The event was organized by the IPCC, requesting feedback on how they could better communicate the results that they present in their assessment reports.  The IPCC is the body charged with assessing the science related to climate change, and their reports are widely viewed as the gold standard in presenting a consensus view of scientists about these issues.  At the same time, the reports have also been criticized for being hard to read and understand.

To distill a very interesting discussion down to its essence, the bottom line of the contributions of the panel members, and the questions and answers that followed, was this: as human beings, we respond to stories.  So to communicate the results of climate change, we need a layer of storytelling between the technical details of the reports and the listening ears of the world.   As a scientist and a teacher, I think that is exactly right.  And indeed it is the same message that my Swarthmore colleague Tristan Smith has been conveying, bringing the work of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science to Swarthmore’s campus via a series of workshops for our students on how to be better communicators.  I’m also assigning the students in my Climate Change class this semester to make one-minute videos of themselves explaining the real science behind one “climate myth” of their choice.

The session did not ultimately answer the key question of whose job this is.  Is it the IPCC’s job to tell more compelling stories?  Personally, I don’t think so—their primary focus has to be to continue to convey the latest science, including its technical detail and its uncertainty.  And, as Paul Lussier of Yale pointed out in the session, what resonates with one group may not resonate with another—your story may not be my story.  Lussier is the founder of the Science Communication with Impact Network (SCWIN), and he argued that effective climate change communication should start by connecting with values: Do you care about food?  About the oceans?  About livable cities?  About social justice and equity for low-income people?   Any of these things can connect with climate change, and Lussier argued that you will be more willing to dive into understanding the science of climate change if your point of entry into the issue is via something you value, rather than climate change being a (relatively abstract) idea in and of itself.

In that light, it’s encouraging to see the number of organizations here at COP21 that are focused on telling the climate change story in different ways and engaging people via particular issues that resonate with them.  As for me, I’ll keep telling the stories in the ways that I can, and I hope that you will, too.

** Will upload voice recordings and videos to youtube channel at some point. Files are too large to process through wordpress

Today I tried branching out from the side event proceedings (which were getting increasingly stale) to try and mingle with delegates, observers, and participants from other countries and try my luck in the plenaries. This worked out far better than I imagined it would. Although there were individuals from all sorts of different backgrounds, everyone was open to talking about their problems and solutions though asking for hopes seemed to be a bit of a contentious issue. I managed to land some solid conversations and even interviews with quite a few people. I talked to a geologist from the Comoros about the effects of climate change on their nation as island-state, a lady from the French delegation about how France engages civil society in matters involving environmental initiatives, and a participant from Denmark from the Nordic Council of Ministers. I also got to hear about how Saudi Arabia is pursuing Carbon Sequestration technologies (most of which ironically involve producing byproducts to process more fossil fuels).

Additionally, today seemed to be a good day for sighting some higher level delegates. I recorded (Coming soon) some remarks by Kevin Rudd, the former PM of Australia who dispensed some helpful advice on pushing the political agenda for the purpose of combating climate change, and got to piggyback onto an ongoing interview with the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, who apparently had been in some unsatisfying meetings with President Obama earlier on in the COP (also coming soon).  Also, in addition to having a satisfying day connecting with a broader set of individuals, I attended the “fossil of the day” award mock ceremony which is usually held to highlight “awards” to the Parties of the day who were the most obstructive to the progress of negotiations. Today, however was different. Instead of a fossil, the Phillippines and Costa Rica were lauded for being part of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) with other LDCs such as Bangladesh and Afghanistan to declare their intentions through the Manila-Paris agreement adopted on November 30th to move to 100% renewable energy and decarbonize their economies by 2050 in an attempt to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  Pretty exciting for Day 2.

 

The first day of the COP21 started off at full tilt. Signs, graffiti, and artwork highlighting the event paved my way from the airport all the way to Le Bourget. After making a brief cameo at the hostel for a much-needed shower after my red-eye flight, I bolted over to the COP area to get my badge and throw myself in the mix. I got in later than most people since the registration was closed for NGOs this morning, but luckily security took pity on me and I managed to worm my way in just a bit early with enough time to scout around before attending my first side event. I was blown away. As soon as I entered the exhibit hall, scores of delegates from every country you can name flowed past me like schools of fish, weaving their way through the oceans of stands with their multi-colored climate-related flyers,  jabbering heatedly to one another in a trifecta of different languages. I passed gigantic rows of tables full of reporters and observers plugged into their computers, all simultaneously plugging away at their Macbooks and watching streams of the Leaders’ event being held in the massive plenary halls across the way. On one hand, it was definitely overwhelming to witness, but at the same time comforting to know that there were so many people invested in the outcome of the COP. After getting my bearings (by which I mean getting lost several times and also getting booted out of the press area), I finally settled down at the first of side events I attended that day, “COP21: The Key Issues”

During the course of this event in which the delegates chairing the panel discussion trickled in and out, I was able to listen to representatives of developing countries including India, China, and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) voice their thoughts on their own intentions for the COP21, what they believed the key issues on the agenda to be, and the results they wished to see. Each group had a different perspective on how they were approaching the COP, but there was a surprising amount of overlap between these nations especially  in regards to the role of developed nations and the issues they viewed to be crucial. All of the parties named adaptation and mitigation strategies to be the most important agenda items for this COP, and called for developed nations to take a bigger role in supplying technology and financial resources to ensures the success of these strategies. Both India and China in particular stood by their usual ground, using the argument of historically generated emissions from developed nations as the case for setting up “Common, But Differentiated Responsibilities” (CBDR) for developing nations and call for technology transfers and other aid to be provided to them by developed countries on this basis. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised.

The next side event I attended was centered on the inclusion of indigenous people in the Reducing Deforestation and Degredation (REDD) mechanisms (http://www.un-redd.org/aboutredd). Traditionally, REDDs are set up in such a way that the indigenous people living on the land may get persecuted for their way of life by the legal boundaries set by the REDDs without reaping any of the benefits which instead go to the governments or NGOs implementing them, bypassing indigenous people as stakeholders in their own cultural lands. The panel for this side event consisted of a coalition Peruvian and Canadian indigenous peoples who laid out suggestions and an alternative framework for ensuring that above all, the territorial and cultural rights of their people were preserved under REDD schemes. This framework stresses the importance of continued stakeholder involvement, proper implementation monitoring among other improvements to the existing REDD mechanisms.

Finally, I attended a side event on the role of civil participation in the Green Climate Fund. Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of the busts of my day, as basically all the panelists really had to say on this matter is that more civil society participation would be good for the GCF in a general sense to offer more feedback, insights, and opinions beyond the ones already there. Given that this would probably happen no matter who they added to the GCF board, I would say that this was sort of a cop-out answer. On the plus side, I did catch an interesting debate about the role of small-scale renewable energy distribution in Indonesia as a potential way of averting some effects of industrialization, and that made me happy in a nerdy sort of way.

 

What if we could see what we’re doing?  One of the challenges of climate change as a global problem is that the underlying cause—greenhouse gas emissions—is largely invisible.  We associate “emissions” with “pollution”, which is correct in this case, but we’ve done a much better job of cleaning up the visible emissions (like the smog that blanketed Los Angeles starting in the 1950s) than we have with greenhouse gas emissions.  And part of that may be the fact that it’s not in our faces like other emissions are.  Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State and an IPCC member, notes in this Marketplace story that in the 19th century we had much more visible “emissions” from our horse-based transportation system.  If our roads were being covered in waste at the pace of about an inch per year, perhaps we’d feel a greater sense of urgency about cleaning it up.

And not only can we not see it, but it doesn’t stay in one place.  Arguably Los Angeles was motivated to clean up its act because they could see the problem and it was clear that the source was local, so that local actions could help address a local problem.  Greenhouse gases, on the other hand, don’t stay local; while particulate emissions like soot are heavy enough to fall out of the atmosphere within a few hundred miles of where they are emitted, CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.  That means that it circles the globe in just a few weeks, and eventually mixes entirely into the global atmosphere within a year or so, which makes anyone’s local greenhouse gas emissions a global problem.

I was struck by this today when I saw the image above (in a display from the Korea Green Foundation, one of many organizations that are displaying their work here in the hall devoted to observer / NGO organizations) right after hearing President Obama call for “a strong system of transparency that gives all of us confidence that all of us are meeting our commitments.”   Transparency, in this case, would be good, since in the context of these talks it means that countries would commit to some sort of accountability about the extent to which they are meeting their commitments to reduce their emissions.  Exactly what form that takes, and how strong an obligation it will be, remains to be seen.  That will be one of the negotiating points over the next two weeks.  Let’s hope that it will indeed be strong, so that, counterintuitively, the increased transparency will help us see what we’re doing and work hard to fix it.

“No surprises.”  That was the emphatic message from Christiana Figueres this afternoon at a security briefing before the kickoff of COP21 tomorrow.  Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (and also Swarthmore class of 1979), emphasized the security challenges of the conference, which tomorrow will bring together almost 150 heads of state.  She said that that is the largest number of heads of state that have ever come together anywhere, for any reason, in one day, even at other UN events.  What “no surprises” means in this context is that security will react rapidly to anything unexpected that happens anywhere in the venue.  So while she didn’t say so in so many words, I took her to be saying in part that any sort of outcry / demonstration / interjection could have negative consequences, as anything surprising would provoke an “immediate reaction” from security.

She emphasized the importance of participation from “civil society” and stressed that it would be possible for people to make their points and have their voices heard—as long as security was aware beforehand of what they planned to do.  She said that a “legally-binding agreement” that is “fair” and “transformational” is “the star that we are reaching toward,” but added, “We have to keep our eyes on the stars, but we also have to keep our feet on the ground.”  And the ground, in her metaphor, is a security atmosphere that is very tense right now.   Kevin, the head of security (at right in the photo above), repeated the “no surprises” theme, but also said to the assembled group of observer delegates, “we will work with you to achieve your goals.”

Interestingly, Figueres extended her “no surprises” theme to the negotiations, saying that the COP President will bring no surprises to the floor, and that she didn’t want any from other parties, either.  I don’t know enough about how these negotiations work to know how surprising a statement that is.  I presume that it is intended to apply to how debate occurs on the floor, rather than implying anything about flexibility (or lack thereof) in what a final agreement might look like.

After an overnight flight from Philadelphia (one of the emptiest flights I’ve been on in quite some time), I’m excited to be here in Paris for the start of COP21.  “COP” is the “Conference of the Parties”, in this case the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  U.N. member delegations from around the world are convening here in Paris this week and next to negotiate an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  I’m here this week (along with Swarthmore College students Indiana Reid-Shaw and Dakota Pekerti) to observe the negotiations (and the many side events that go along with it – essentially a large climate change conference, with an expected attendance of 40,000 people).  We’ll be here for the week, and next week we’ll hand the baton to Professor Ayse Kaya and students Stephen O’Hanlon and Anita Desai, who will come for the final week of the negotiations.  (Swarthmore College has three “badges”, official credentials for attending the conference.  We are not parties to the negotiations, but rather are “observers”, an official designation that encompasses roughly half of those in attendance.  For a nice summary of COP, listen to this presentation by Neil Leary from Dickinson College.)

Arriving in Paris, preparations for the conference are obvious everywhere – signs in the airport, special kiosks with information, lots of helpful people in green vests to help you figure out where to go.  And today and tomorrow, free public transportation throughout the city as many major roads are closed as part of the tight security surrounding the arrival of many heads of state (including President Obama) to kick off the negotiations.

At the conference venue itself (in Le Bourget, north of Paris), I was greeted with a display of flags of the U.N. member countries:

Security to get into the venue was much like an airport – metal detectors, all bags x-rayed – but moved quickly due to the large number of people working.  After getting photographed for my badge, I headed into the venue.  It’s a little disorienting at first – several different pavilions, each housing different types of displays or meeting rooms.  (Just a few hours of sleep probably isn’t helping with the disorientation factor.)

One of the pavilions has displays from some (many?  most?) of the countries in attendance, all with different styles.  The U.S. looks like they are expecting to be holding group events there:

whereas Mexico’s display is more focused on showcasing impacts of climate change (there was a video display highlighting the recent hurricane that hit Mexico’s west coast, and tying it to expected increased frequency of severe weather events from climate change) as well as highlighting renewable energy projects around the country.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (Persian gulf states) has one of the fancier displays – I haven’t yet looked inside to see how they are presenting their engagement with the issue of climate change.

Mostly things are quiet – a fair amount of set-up still going on, but not a huge number of people in attendance just yet.  I’m sure that tomorrow things will be much busier, including the press area:

Unfortunately, one of the big events originally scheduled for today (a large public march through Paris) was canceled in the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks.   Events inside the conference venue are continuing as planned (with the BBC even suggesting that an agreement is more likely since the attacks), but outside events in public spaces have been canceled.

Looking forward to the actual start of the conference tomorrow!