Prep Your COP Coverage: COPs 101 | What Every Journalist Should Know About Climate Diplomacy

Transcript

Santiago Sáez: Hello and welcome. My name is Santiago Sáez. I’m the Director of Training here at Covering Climate Now. I’m joined today by my colleagues Andy McCormick, who’s our Deputy Director, and Elena González. And we’re also joined today by James Fahn, founder and executive director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. Hello everyone. Thank you. How many COPs have you covered, James?

James Fahn: That is a good question. It must be maybe perhaps 20 or so. I think it’s getting up there. Yes. First COP is kind of Yeah, so I guess I’m a veteran, a veteran of the COP wars. Yeah,

Santiago Sáez: That’s quite impressive. Yes. James Fahn, apart from a COP veteran, is the Executive Director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, which is a global community of over 34,000 reporters who cover environmental topics. James is a journalist who has primarily focused on environmental, climate and science issues in low and middle income countries. He’s also a lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, where he taught a graduate level class on international environmental reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism. James has spent most of his professional career based in Asia, so if you guys are from Asia, he’s a very valuable contact and input to have, where he was a reporter and later for The Nation, an English language daily newspaper based in Bangkok, and hosted Thai feature television show. His book, A Land on Fire, recounts the issues and scandals he uncovered while working on the environmental beat in the south in Southeast Asia. James has also written for the New York Times, Scientific American, Newsweek, The Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Jakarta Post, cydef.net, nature.com, The Huffington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review. So welcome James. That is, that is a lot, and that is a fantastic experience to share with our participants today. Here Covering Climate Now, just just to remind you, we are a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets from all around the world and 1000s of journalists who are all committed to increasing and improving the coverage of what we think is the defining story of our time, which is climate change. We have plenty of resources, plenty of newsletters and trainings that you can access that just go to coveringclimatenow.org and see everything we have to offer. Everything we do is for free for journalists. So if you’re a journalist, there’s something for you there.

And also just a quick reminder before we start, this is the first webinar in a series of three. So we have sessions… tomorrow, we will be talking about what’s the stake of this particular COP 30. And on Wednesday, that’s when we will get more practical and see the actual tools that will come in handy when you’re working on it, either on the field or remotely. And today, we will see the difference between those and why it’s very important to have to have both covered. Very importantly, if you want to attend any other session, any of those two sessions, you have to sign up independently from this one. So it’s you need to go back and register for those individually, we’ll share the links in the chat, and now I think we can, we can start the session, all right. So today we will be talking about COP, which is a central event in global climate diplomacy. Diplomacy and international relations are very, very important for for climate action. I think this might be intuitive if you’ve been into this a bit, but just in case, it is, climate change is a global phenomenon, so international cooperation is key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this cooperation is far, far from being straightforward. It’s not, it’s not easy. That’s why James has been to 20 COPs, because we are, we have been trying to deal with this for quite a while. As journalists, even if your focus is not global, even if you’re focusing on local or national events, is very, very important for you to understand how these global dealings work, when to expect pegs for your stories. I mean, this is a time of the year where lots of media seems to suddenly get some interest in climate change, so it’s important to know when you’re going to have those pegs and who are the main players in the climate diplomacy and international relations field. We’ll start today with some basic concepts, including the COP process, and some ideas that you’ll hear come up throughout the session, such as climate finance, nationally determined contributions. And we will then review a few key moments in the history of climate diplomacy and talk a bit more about the tricky topic of climate finance, which is quite central to the COP process. Once we know where to look for stories, we’ll look at the main points of conflict that you can that you can expect from this, for this whole process, we also explore the specific problems and contradictions that the nature of COP generates, and which which of those spark debate and conversations every year. These are all critical to understand COP outcomes and the COP process, and we will not be diving very deep today on the issues are important in this year’s COP. But as I’ll say, we have another session specifically for that tomorrow at the same time. So please sign up if you’re if you can, and if you’re interested in those in those more up to date topics.

Everything we say today, everything we share in the chat, everything you hear, has been recorded, and we will share it with you. If you’re attending this this webinar, will share everything with you in a follow up email, which we’ll probably send at the end of this week. So don’t worry, you don’t need to copy everything and take notes, unless you really like that, then please, by all means. You will receive an email with everything you need to have. All right, so let’s start. COP, yeah, so COP, COP, what’s COP? Cop is an acronym, and today, we’re going to be seeing lots of acronyms, because this seems to be the most common thing for all climate international relations is the love for acronyms, and some of them very long. So in this case, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and it can be confusing sometimes, because there’s more than one cop. Actually, there are several cops, and three of them look at environment. There’s one for climate, there’s one for biodiversity and that one for desertification. Sorry, today we’re going to be focusing mostly on on the climate one, the UNFCCC COP, which is, bear with me here is a Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So that’s a big mouthful, and that’s why we need an acronym, and we call it just COP, and everybody knows what we’re talking about. Yes, it is a big acronym, but as I said, this is what you will encounter. We will share a few today, not a lot. There are many, many more. I recommend that you bookmark a good glossary. We particularly use and like the IISD glossary, it’s very complete. It has lots of concepts. We’re going to share that in the chat, but also you have it in you’ll have it in that email that I mentioned before. Now, what’s the purpose of COP? So COP… the purpose of COPs to assess and to shape global climate action, to coordinate, to coordinate policies, to coordinate progress. It’s a moment usually around two weeks. Usually no it should be two weeks. Sometimes it goes a bit over time when negotiators from every country on earth meet for two weeks every year and try to agree on sets of rules to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to climate change. They also try to coordinate on loss and damage and to help countries green their economies and build resilience and help them adapt to climate change. That’s theoretically the purpose of COP. All COP agreements are approved by consensus, which means that every single party to the framework needs to be in agreement with with the decision that is taken at the end. This is very, very important, and we’ll see why a bit later.

Now, every year, COP takes place, as you know, in a different city and a different country around the world. There’s there are some, not very complex, but there are some rules on how this rotates and it rotates over different regions in the world. That’s not very important right now, but it is important to know that the last few have been held in fossil fuel rich countries, and that many of these countries also have authoritarian regimes. We’re talking about Egypt, we’re talking about the United Arab Emirates. We’re talking about Azerbaijan. This year. COP is in Brazil, which doesn’t have an authoritarian government, but it is also a fossil fuel rich country, and we will see particularly tomorrow. Today, we’ll touch really quickly on that, but tomorrow, we’ll see why that is very important as well. So I’m going to ask our guest, James Fahn to join us for a second to tell me a bit more about the precendence.This is something that I that I have as a journalist, struggle with at the beginning, when I were the first cops. Why is so important? Who is holding the presidency? What’s the role? Why does it matter?

James Fahn: Thanks, Santi. And it’s wonderful to be here with all of you. Um, the presidency is basically the chief diplomat. He or she is the person who is really wrangling all the countries, all the negotiating blocks, trying to get, find out where there is area, where there are areas of agreement, which, of course, is not easy. When you have, you know 195 different plus you know different countries, plus all the observers. And you’re trying to find, find the text that everyone can agree on, agree upon by the end. And so the presidency is, is really important. They’re the ones who, kind of, after the first week, will come forward with, kind of the the first the draft text that will be the subject of really hardcore negotiations. He or she is the one trying to remove the bracketed text. So sometimes during COP you hear this, this term referred to as bracketed text, that is text which has been proposed but has not been agreed to. So the more you can remove the brackets, the more agreement you have. And as you can imagine, there’s a lot of heated discussion over each little word. So, yeah, the presidency is really crucial. You know, we’ve had some successful ones, some not so successful ones, and, you know, so and and in in Brazil, at COP 30, Ambassador do Lago is going to be very crucial figure to determine the outcome of the COP.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you so much, James. As James mentioned at the end of the first week, and I think this is also very important COPs usually…can we go back one slide a second? Yes, we are like COP usually takes place over two weeks. Usually it’s at the end of November or at the beginning of December this year. As you know, it starts next week, which is mid November. And traditionally, these two weeks are different. The first week usually has like, technical negotiations going on. These are lower level officials or officers from each country who try to hash out all the technical details, and then the second week, high level decision makers, usually the ministers or representatives from those ministers who can actually, who have the authority to actually agree on in the name of their government, come together and go over this trying to, as James said, remove the brackets from the bracketed text. We’ll see a lot about these brackets on the third session of this series. That’s on Wednesday, so I hope you can make it as well. This means that many journalists actually only go to the second week of the of COP. Usually, if you go to COPs here and you go there for the full two weeks, you realize that the first week there’s a lot of space to sit in the press room you have. You can sit basically wherever you want. There’s not a queue for to get coffee. It’s quite easy. And then the second week gets suddenly really, really hectic, and there’s lots of people running around everywhere, and you can meet lots of, lots of friends that week. There’s, there’s COP friends, I’m sure James, you have lots of COP friends that you see every year the second week of the COP.

James Fahn: Yeah, it’s, it’s, sometimes it feels like a world unto itself. You’re kind of stuck in this big conference venue for for one or two weeks. And sometimes you see, yes, as you say, you see people there that you don’t see throughout the year, and then you come back and there they are. And sometimes they change jobs or their situations change, because we know that the political situation around climate change is always shifting, but you do feel a bit cloistered in there, and after coming out, after two weeks, you feel like you can you feel like you’ve been through a significant experience, for sure.

Santiago Sáez: So apart from those people you meet, you’ll meet lots of people in the corridors and in the different spaces of the conference, but some of those are very, very important for you as journalists. And those are the negotiators. The negotiators are those who can access negotiation… negotiation rooms, and you cannot access them as as as a journalist. These are behind closed closed doors. Only negotiators and their and their assistants cannot can access so in order to cover the story, you need to be able to get in touch with these people who have access to those rooms. And these people will convey to you what’s going on. Yeah, that’s why, while covering COP remotely is actually possible, you can do it, there’s people who do it, and actually it is necessary, because COP cannot accommodate every journalist in the world who’s got interest in this story. It cannot totally replace being there, because you need to find these people, and usually you do that in some common spaces. Can you give us a tip or two, James, on how to get in touch with negotiator that you’d be running after you would like to get in touch with?

James Fahn: Well, the best thing, of course, is really to be prepared and to figure out who the negotiators are, especially from your country before, well before COP who are the… your country should know who the chief delegates are and who, who’s going to be, you know, going to the COP and who’s going to be setting policy. So if, the earlier you can find that out, the better you know, obviously, get their phone numbers or email their contact information. If you’re not able to go yourself, and of course, most, most of us are not able to go, then, you know, you can reach it out to them remotely. Or, yeah, that’s, you know, that’s probably the best way. And even when you’re at the COP, it’s hard to find them. It’s such a huge space, so making sure you have their contact information, of course, is key. If you are there, there are other opportunities to run into them. There are all kinds of side events, as I’m sure we’ll get into about everything related to COP and often, maybe, and each country has, or many countries have their own pavilions. So if you want to, say, find a negotiator for a certain country, you can often go to their pavilion, or maybe there’s a, you know, a coalition of countries that have that run pavilion, like ASEAN, for instance, or the EU. And so if you really need to find negotiator, you can go to the pavilions and try and meet you know, and find out who to talk to there. And sometimes you know, there are just clever ways to do it, whether it’s you know, you know going to some event, a cocktail reception, that you know is they’re going to be there, or something like that. Obviously, this is a long standing journalistic tradition of finding ways to meet with key sources. I know one of my colleagues, who happens to be a smoker, cigarette smoker. He often managed to contact a lot…a lot of his negotiators went at this smoking session, that smoking area set aside for smoking. So I don’t recommend that necessarily, but there are, you know, you can. You can find them outside the negotiating room. It’s just you gotta figure out how to do it.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you, James, as a former smoker, I can appreciate that, and I know how how much I miss that social part of it. But again, I don’t recommend it either, especially as a former smoker, I know how hard it is. So all right, we’re gonna see now a graph that has been coming up a couple of times, and it’s, it’s not, you don’t need to memorize this or anything like that, but I just to show you something that is quite complex and quite interesting. Every country that is party to the UNF Triple C is sovereign at COP. So every country can make their own decisions, but countries don’t negotiate alone. That would be a waste of resources. So countries actually align in groups that negotiate entire blocks of every issue together. Some of them are very aligned, like the EU, for example, the EU negotiates everything together. The European Union, you have it there on the right of the graph. Some others are very loose, and they only negotiate some topics together, like the umbrella, for example, which is quite an interesting group. Don’t try to follow this right now. It’s just for you to get an idea how complex this can be, and to make you realize that many countries actually belong to more than one negotiating group, and that is important as well, because depending what topic you’re following, and you should choose what topic you’re following, you cannot follow everything at COP that’s impossible. There’s many texts to be negotiated at the same time, and you have to choose the ones you’re interested in, but depending on what topic you’re covering, you will follow, or you will try to get in touch, not necessarily with with the ones with the negotiator from your country, but the for the negotiator that is representing your country through one of these groups. So for example, a negotiator from Algeria might be able to speak for one from Rwanda, in in something as part of a African group member. And in some of the cases, they may be able to reflect the opinion of Venezuela as an OPEC member. And some of the times, they just speak for themselves and not be able to speak for anybody else. So that’s it’s quite interesting, and you have to follow, and you have to get an idea of these, of these groups. Yes. Now here’s some. These are acronyms, by the way, if you’re curious, basic I like AOSIS, LDC, all these are acronyms. If you want to learn more about them, you can go to the glossary. We’re not going to get into them today, because there’s a lot. Yeah, well, they are actually there in the bottom right. Here’s another acronym for you, that’s NDC, which stands for nationally determined contribution. These are commitments that countries make in order to accomplish the collective goals established in the Paris Agreement. They establish the country’s goals in mitigation, which is to address the causes of climate change, in adaptation, which focuses on the consequences and NDCs also outline how does the country plan to get there, to get to those goals? So what are the means that they will dedicate to achieve these goals, in terms of policies, in terms of resources, etc. So each country needs to deliver the NDC to the UNFCCC every five years is all acronyms, and precisely this year, we are expecting fresh batch. Actually, many, many countries have already… let me check what is the most updated number last week was 70 something.

James Fahn: Yeah, I think countries representing about 36% of global emissions have submitted their NDC. There was Indonesia recently, yeah,

Santiago Sáez: Actually 61% now, a lot of them, yeah. Today, there was a lot of I checked on Friday, and it wasn’t 36% and today, a lot of them came in, including China, which is, oh, big one, yeah. Big one, yeah. So yeah, these NDCs have submitted every five years, and they cover the critical period between 2025 and 2035 this year. Why I say 10 years? Because they the UNFCCC asks for further goals, not just for the next five years. But that doesn’t mean that in 2030 they don’t have to send in a new one. They will have to do that. Countries have been really late. The deadline initially was in February, and as you can see, we still have a few that haven’t that haven’t submitted. We are right now at 61% I think I just said, 61% of emissions covered by these NDCs. But key players like India and the EU haven’t submitted theirs yet. So very important players haven’t, haven’t said what they plan to do. And yes, we, as I said, China just submitted it today.

Last week, however, even with lots of these NDCs missing, the UNFCCC published a synthesis report of the NDCs that were already submitted and some and included also data that had been announced but not officially sent in from actors like China and the EU the outcome of this synthesis report is not great. It seems that we’re going to drop according to these plans, if these plans are accomplished, we would drop only 10% in carbon emissions by 2035 which is extremely insufficient and incompatible with the Paris Agreement target. It’s like 1/6 of where we should be. This is a massive climate story this year, especially as the fast shifting geopolitical landscape and the US’s second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Not only the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, but also, like the general geopolitical position of the US, has countries reconsidering their approach to climate negotiations. The commitments taken this year will determine if we succeed or we fail in achieving the Paris Agreement goals. Which, to be clear, is not just a diplomatically negotiated ideal, but it’s a matter of scientific necessity. According to science, that 1.5 and two degrees thresholds represent the limit for global temperature rise if humanity hopes to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We’re sharing where you can find all the NDCs. We have the official register from the UNFCCC, but also, like some trackers that have contained some extra data and it’s quite interesting. And you also have the climate action tracker, which doesn’t track NDCs, but track climate policy and climate action in different countries, and it’s super interesting. Now, one final question for James, before I pass the mic to to Andy, James, how does a journalist sit down with an NDC and cover it, what is the main question that you would be asking if you were covering an NDC right now?

James Fahn: Well, the main question is to compare it to past NDC, which was last given out at Glasgow, which I guess was 2021, and see, you know what has changed? You know what kind of new, new commitments the country is actually making. And you know, how far does that get us to the goal, as you mentioned, of reaching, you know, 1.5 degrees of warming, no more than 1.5 degrees of warming by 2050 which is the Paris set goal. So you really want to say…and it’s tricky to do that, because it seems like each country has its own own set of goals that aren’t always easy to compare to each other. They compare emissions to different years they have different…. China uses carbon intensity, so the amount of carbon per per economic unit. So comparing them is really a tricky task. It’s it can you can certainly do it for, you know, a few countries, or one or two countries, and that’s what I’d recommend. But we do rely on some of those resources that you mentioned to give us the bigger picture, because it is so complicated, the way that the NDCs come out.

Santiago Sáez: Just to remind you, you can download any NDC from those and have a look, I recommend that you just download the one from your country, if it’s already published. If not, it should be published soon this week, hopefully. But yeah, I recommend that. Yeah, James.

James Fahn: I just want to make the point. This is a larger point. Maybe it’s an obvious one, but what the NDCs, they were started at Paris in 2015 and what they really represent, of course, our voluntary commitments, and that may seem like an obvious thing now, but the thing to remember is that for the first, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years of COP, the goal was more to kind of set a group of legally binding commitments. And that was really the goal set forth for Kyoto, at COP three, and then at Copenhagen and at COP 15, I believe it was that was in 2009 so Kyoto was 1997, Copenhagen was 2009 and that effort to create legally binding commitments, which is natural, because that’s what we have within our countries, right? We set you know, we often pass laws that make policies legally binding, but it just, it just didn’t prove that workable on the international stage, trying to get consensus from 195 plus countries and and so the big shift that we’ve seen in the COP negotiations was a shift from okay, we can’t necessarily create legally binding commitments, but we’ll switch to these voluntary commitments that we call NDCs, nationally determined contributions. And that really unlocked, I think, more agreement, more optimism, so countries didn’t feel like they were committing to something that they could be, you know, legally, legally assessed for illegally enforced.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you, James, and precisely, that’s a perfect segue. I’m going to throw it on to my colleague Andy, who’s going to talk more about the history of COPs and how we got here in the first place.

Andrew McCormick: All right, hey again everyone, and thanks again for being here. Grateful also to James for his time and expertise. And as Santi says, what James just spoke to a couple of the past COPs is a perfect segue, because I’m going to speak with you through some of the history of the process and how we got here to today. Bear with me for a moment, because to get started here, we’re going to go back in time a bit. It is 1992 the Cold War has just come to an end. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and now incoming is a huge global trade boom. This is ushering in a period of rapid development around the world, but also of increased pollution. And questions that are not necessarily new, but they’re of renewed importance about how to balance the benefits of all this development taking place, which include, notably, a major reduction in global poverty, with the need to also protect the environment. In 1992 it’s already been several decades since scientists determined that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are heating the planet, and that these are the express result of burning fossil fuels, those very same fossil fuels that countries in the 1990s are counting on to spur their economic growth. In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and then newly elected US President George H W Bush, who was the father of the later President George W Bush, promises to counter quote the greenhouse effect with quote, “The White House Effect.” Very well, so what is humanity going to do to stave off the climate catastrophe that in 1992 we’ve already known for a long time is coming. In June of 1992 leaders from more than 150 countries gather in Rio de Janeiro for what is remembered today as the Earth Summit. There they discuss many issues that will remain critical in global climate talks for decades to come. Those include water scarcity, toxic byproducts of modern industry, and doubly critical alternative sources of energy to replace fossil fuels, which oh, by the way, in 1992 humanity has already developed solar power and the lithium ion batteries that today power electric vehicles. Though, of course, both of those technologies are primitive compared to what we have now. But that’s just to say that you know that technology that now we are still trying, trying to put into the field is already on the scene. The result of the Earth Summit in Brazil is an agreement to establish the UNFCCC, which will become the main global body to address climate change, and the framework by which we’ll get the annual conference with the party’s system, or COP, which Santiago discussed a moment ago. Rio is a victory for the planet by every right, yet nevertheless, some of the seeds of future disaster and discord might already be planted. Here’s what US president again, George HW Bush says at that conference in Brazil, and I encourage you really to listen to the kind of verbal gymnastics at play here. Bush says quote, “that economic growth provides the resources for environmental protection, and environmental protection ensures that growth is sustainable.”

In other words, we should continue doing the very thing that’s hurting the planet to ensure that we can protect the planet. According to Climate Home News, it is thought that as the creation of the UN’s climate change body, the UNFCCC, was being negotiated, US President Bush is the loudest voice in the room calling for mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cuts to be replaced with voluntary measures. The deal in Rio is only signed once that revision is made. And again, that’s all the way back in 1992 speaking to this balance of binding measures versus voluntary measures that James spoke to just a moment ago. The first UNFCCC COP is held in 1995 in Berlin. But arguably the first milestone breakthrough comes at the third COP in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, there leaders agree on what’s called the Kyoto Protocol, which legally binds countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a world first and an upgrade of that agreement in Rio five years before, where measures were voluntary in 2001 though just two months after he’s sworn in as the new US president, George W Bush, again, the son of the earlier president, Bush renounces the Kyoto Protocol. He says, quote, “The Kyoto treaty would affect our economy in a negative way. We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.” Factually, Bush’s claims contradict widely agreed upon science even at the time, but they’re in line with a broader global trend of climate change denial and delay by some wealthy nations, petrostates and fossil fuel companies. And today, of course, we find echoes of Bush’s rhetoric in Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 and again earlier this year. So I’m going to talk about the COPs that go on into the future in Copenhagen in Paris in a moment. But first, James, I want to ask, is there anything that you’d kind of say about this state of climate negotiations at this point in history, after Kyoto in the late 90s, early 2000s what’s the kind of tone, and are there any kind of themes coming up in global climate negotiations that maybe foreshadow our climate situation today?

James Fahn: Yeah, thanks, Andy, so I’d say, you know, you do a good job there of recording the fractures in the negotiations that go back to the very beginning. And of course, the UNFCCC is a framework agreement, so it just says we agreed to discuss this. And then these other protocols, like the Kyoto Protocol, like Paris, they were, they were crucial to actually setting, you know, what policy will be. And I think going the key issue for especially for the United States um, was that they didn’t want to agree to binding limits that they thought would disadvantage the US economically in comparison to rising economic powers like China and India. And so that was always the the US position was, well, we can’t agree to this unless some, you know, all, all the countries agreed to it, but the, but the kind of the the global South, as we like to call it, they, they refuse to. They said, you know, they made the argument that the wealthy countries have already benefited from from polluting the atmosphere through greater use of fossil fuels, and they had the right to catch up. And so they would never agree to binding limits, at least not at that time. So, so that was always the dividing line and the point of contention. And even in 1997 at Kyoto, I mean, it was clear right then and there, you know, that the US was not going to agree to join the Kyoto Protocol. You know, I spoke to John Kerry in Kyoto, which I was covering for the Thai newspaper I worked for, and at the end of copy said, you know, no, it’s it, you know, he acknowledged even that he and he was a big champion. Kerry is a big champion of the whole climate negotiation process. But even he, back then, realized the US was not going to agree to join. And the US Senate, it wasn’t just the president, the Senate voted against joining 95 to zero. So what was interesting was there was also there all these other simultaneous efforts going on. One of them was a big push to create a market, a carbon market, right, a trading mechanism whereby countries could, you know, countries where it was difficult to cut emissions, could pay other countries where it was easier to to reduce them, and the and the US was the champion of a carbon market and the trading mechanism. But what’s ironic, as the at Kyoto there was the agreement to create a trading mechanism, which was kind of a victory for the US, but then it was the US didn’t join it, because they did not join the protocol. And instead, the EU kind of became the EU, and a few other countries, became the key implementers of this trading mechanism, which is has taken different forms, but it’s still in effect today, the clean development mechanism and so on. So this is a there are all these parallel negotiations that go on. It’s not just about cutting emissions. We’ve seen negotiations on loss and damage, which is become, you know, create now has its own funding mechanism. There’s a adaption, adaptation theme that’s going throughout, and it’s going to be very increasingly important is, how do we fund adaptation? And overall, I guess the the main parallel theme is climate finance.

Okay, so you’ve got negotiations on what each country is going to do in terms of reducing emissions, but also who is going to pay? Who’s going to pay for emission, emission cuts and investing in all this, you know, renewable and clean energy that we need to install to get us to the 1.5 degree limit so that climate finance negotiation has always been a tricky one, you know, and it continues to be a major focus of attention. Yeah, I think it does matter how you approach a COP and basically what your expectations are. Because if you’re expecting a grand global agreement at each COP, it’s just, I think, I think it’s probably unrealistic and they’re going to be there’s going to be some final text which kind of papers over differences. And, you know, maybe it has some hopeful language, but in most cases, it’s really, really hard to get consensus from 196 countries to agree on anything much less you know how to handle the one of the fundamental bases of their economy. So by all means, you gotta focus on negotiations and what’s you know? What’s happening, you know, in behind closed doors, but there’s so many other things happening at the COP that are so interesting, because you have this, you know, this huge meeting of everyone and anyone, not everyone, certainly, but of all kinds of issues related to climate change. And there’s so many fascinating side events and conferences going on simultaneously that I think there’s a lot to learn and a lot of inspiration to draw from everything else. I mean, it’s just a great chance to learn about what projects are making progress in other parts of the world, whether new innovations that are coming to the fore, what are the new issues that we’re going to be seeing everything from, you know, resilience to geoengineering to, you know, blue carbon economies and so on. I mean, there’s so much that you can focus on. And so I think, from as a journalist, yes, cover the main event, but pick out a few key issues that you think your audiences will be most interested in, and try and and follow, follow the discussions regarding that at COP is really it’s just a great opportunity to make contacts with new sources, with experts from all over the world, and just to learn. It’s like a two week immersion course for all of us.

Andrew McCormick: Right? As you say, all of these kind of remaining, like even though many of these questions have been going on for more than decades, remain kind of critical points of contention now, and you brought up a really important theme at the beginning of your answer. There’s this kind of like, fundamentally, climate change is a global problem that requires cooperation to solve, and yet many countries are coming to the table from a mindset still of global competition, kind of concerns about their dominance, especially economic dominance, on the world stage, and with that mindset kind of underlying a lot of the negotiations, unfortunately, some of that cooperation that is necessary often remains to be seen. So I’m going to move forward a little bit. In 2009 we have another momentous COP which which James mentioned a moment ago in Copenhagen, although this time, it’s not necessarily for the better. The goal at COP 15, in a way, is to update the Kyoto Protocol, but negotiations quickly stall with countries arguing over one another’s historic responsibility for the climate crisis and in turn, how much of global total emissions reduction burden should fall to those developed versus the developing countries. Even within negotiating blocks, there are major rifts. China, for example, is a prominent voice amongst the developing countries, but it rejects many of the ambitious goals that smaller nations put forth. While not everything winds up a complete failure, Copenhagen, on the whole, is remembered by many for the fault lines in the COP process that it made all too evident, many of which, again, we still see in COPs today. Countries kind of playing the blame game and deflecting responsibility, as well as agreements becoming progressively more watered down and failing to create legal structures to ensure that real change occurs. Keep those in mind, in 2015 it’s in Paris at COP 21 that the world does finally get what it was looking for in Copenhagen, when it’s passed, the Paris Agreement represents a truly momentous leap forward in climate diplomacy, because it’s the first time that all parties, all 196 countries present commit themselves to climate action, along with a roadmap to reach a net zero emissions future, nations agree to limit global temperature rise to quote, “well below 2 degrees Celsius, with an ideal goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

At the time In 2015 the world has just crossed the one degree mark, while today we’re already above 1.3 degrees. And just recently, you may have seen that UN Secretary General António Guterres said that told The Guardian that we have all but certainly crossed 1.5 degrees irrevocably, or will cross that in the near term, and that that obviously will have disastrous consequences, especially for the least wealthy nations in the world. In Paris, though parties also lay out each of their nationally determined contributions, which, as Santiago explained earlier, specified each country’s own emissions reduction goal and what they’ll do to get there. NDCs again, we agree, will be updated every five years, and this year 2025 as you heard, is one of those years. There’s a lot more to say about the Paris Agreement, and we can’t get into all of it here, but do suffice it to say that Paris resets the table of global climate diplomacy and opens an unfortunately brief period of optimism that the world can actually tackle this problem. Many of the goals, principles and processes that Mark climate diplomacy today a decade later, can all be traced back to Paris. So fast forwarding again. This brings us to the past several years of COPs. Recent COPs have been kind of a mixed bag. Important issues like financial support to developing countries and the need to ditch coal have been brought to the forefront of climate negotiations. But on the other hand, deals reached at the end of each COP never quite achieve what organizers say they must going into the conferences at a time when there’s really no more time to waste if we do hope to avoid the worst of climate change. Often, this is clear in last minute changes to language in final agreements, words like coal phase out become words like coal phase down instead, for example, a determination to quote “phase out coal becomes more of a vague pledge to quote transition away from fossil fuels.” I saw one academic paper that described this phenomenon of COP language becoming more and more watered down as, quote, “the survival of the weakest language.” Of particularly important note, as Santiago, mentioned earlier, the last three COPs have been held in authoritarian countries which which have major stakes in the fossil fuel based economy. Those are Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, the latter, the latter two of which are outright petrostates. This year, is in Brazil, which is a democracy, but also a major oil producer. Fossil fuel companies traditionally are increasingly showing up in force at recent COPs with their lobbyists frequently outnumbering most countries official delegations. Some commentators have declared the COP process fundamentally broken, while other answer…while others answer that, whether we like it or not, COP is the only truly global process that the world has. Meaning it’s the only process that includes every country in the world, and that our only choice is to continue approaching it every year with as much enthusiasm and intent as humanity can muster. James, I do want to ask you, for journalists covering COP I think that this idea that the COP process is kind of no longer working can be a bit demoralizing. Folks show up with kind of trying to so much energy to try to give this coverage. They’re all but there’s this feeling after every cop that the event has been somewhat of a failure. How do you think this argument should influence how journalists cover COP? And maybe, where might journalists find maybe, kind of inspiration or motivation even despite a process that can sometimes prove lackluster.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you, James. Thank you. Andy and I’ll pick it up from here. We don’t have that much time, and I want to leave a bit of time for questions. If you guys haven’t, by the way, you have that Q and A function there at the bottom of your screen, please add your questions there. We’ll try to save a couple of minutes to get through at least some of them. So we’re talking a bit about COP as a main scenario where climate diplomacy happens. But that’s not the only scenario where where climate diplomacy happens. You can find it. You can find climate talks and climate discussions in other forums, although not as big as the UNFCCC COP. Some of the spaces, I’m going to go real quick about this. I’m not going to stop, but just at the top, I want to highlight the COP on biodiversity, or CBD cop, that is very, very important and very intertwined. Biodiversity and climate are intertwined issues. An increase in global heating affects biodiversity, and at the same time biodiversity is triggers further heating. So it’s very important to have those. You have here a few others. Of course, you know about these. I know I can not stop on all of them, but yeah, you get the idea. Now, something that I want to spend a bit more time on is climate finance. Climate Finance one of the key elements of climate diplomacy. But what do we mean when we say climate finance? Well, that’s really quite complicated. There’s not an agreed upon definition of climate finance. But just to get the ball rolling, let’s say that climate finance refers to the financial resources that are mobilized to tackle climate change and its effects. Note that I’m not saying money, I’m saying financial resources, and I’m not saying pay or transfer, I’m saying mobilized. Those are terms that are quite wider and they take and they include some elements are controversial and that usually very interesting and very important stories. And some of I mean, I’ve been covering climate finance, mostly when I’ve been at COP. So those are the topics that I’m most acquainted with. And as such, it seems to me that they’re the most important things happening at COP, which is not true, but it’s is certainly is essential issue every single year. As I said, sometimes we say money, but climate. Finance includes more than just cash. There are different financial instruments and concepts, there are grants, there are loans, there are guarantees, there are insurance schemes, there are all sorts of elements, and yes, all of that is money, but you have to think of money in the with an open mindset.

Actually, reports consistently show that much of climate finance, or what most countries consider climate finance, as I said, there’s not a definition, universal definition, so this is already tricky, but that comes in forms of loans, and that is problematic, particularly for nations where the nations that most need climate financial resources are already usually deep in depth, and yeah, understanding how money flows is going to tell you a much more nuanced story than just thinking about raw dollar amounts and how much money or how much the country is pledging. Ask yourselves, what, like, how…where does this money go from? Where does money go to, and how does it makes? How does it make this, this path? Is it really reaching where it’s supposed to reach? And in exchange of what? So, what can this climate finance actually fund? Well, here is very important, three very important concepts to be considered, climate finance in general, funding needs to support. What are the three pillars of climate life? Sorry. It seems that I am I back. Can you guys hear me since, uh, my internet kicked me out. Um, thank you so much. That’s right. Um, yes, so to be considered climate finance, you need to fund one of the three main pillars, which are mitigation, adaptation or loss and damage. Yeah. So that’s that’s important. Now, before I go to go on, I’d like to stop a second and talk about this climate justice concept. It’s very, very important, as Andy was mentioning before. And I’m not talking here about when I say justice, I’m not talking about court and litigation. But actually, climate change is always a story about justice, because the people, the communities and the countries they’re suffering, climate changes, worse impacts often contributed the least to the problem, and vice versa. So what? Why do I say this in the context of climate diplomacy? Because countries have agreed to the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities, which is another acronym that you have here, CBDR. This refers to the idea, and here I’m quoting directly from the UNFCCC, that while there’s a duty on all countries to take climate action, the types of action they take will depend on their deferring national circumstances. That means everybody has to do something, but not everybody has to do the same. And yes, this matters for climate justice, for private finance. I will see in a second. I’m just going to wrap this up real quickly with this. And it is that basically, when countries can we move to the next slide? Yes here.

So to wrap this up, this climate finance section, we have another acronym, which is the NCQG, the new collective quantified goal, which was agreed upon last year in Baku, but it’s insufficient, which is $300 billion per year by 2030 the global south says that they need 1.5 trillion, which seems to be more in line with what research says. The Global North argues that some countries, like China and Saudi Arabia should contribute to, but these countries are classified as developing so it’s not so easy to solve all these or some of these issues. At least, there is a document that is. It was supposed to be published today, and I wanted to bring you some of that, but I went to see it this morning, and actually it’s been moved to Wednesday. So check it out, it’s called the Baku to Belem roadmap. If it actually is published on Wednesday, we will see, and this basically the idea of how can we get for what we have, which is obviously insufficient to a more adequate goal, and I’m going to I have more than that, but I will leave it here, because it’s only five minutes left. I want to leave it to Andy, and then hopefully come back for one or two questions.

Andrew McCormick: All right, let’s go ahead and flip forward one slide. I’ll also try to move through this quickly so we have time for a couple of questions. As you’ve just heard from Santi, climate finance is one of the major vexing problems for all of climate diplomacy and for the COP process, specifically, I’m going to speak quickly to a few of the others, which include fossil fuel lobbying petrostates and the frustrations of a consensus-based system. As I mentioned earlier, that fossil fuel industry representatives have been showing up in huge numbers to COPs. Here’s a figure that puts that into perspective. At COP 29 in Baku last year, an analysis found that there were at least 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists. Compare that to only 1,033 delegates who represented the 10 most climate vulnerable countries combined, countries like Chad and Mali and Niger, like Micronesia and the Solomon Islands. At COP 28 the year prior, in Dubai, fossil fuels lobbyists numbered more than 2,400 critics say that this has resulted in the COP process becoming, in part, sort of a greenwashing festival for companies wishing to bolster their green credentials, while at the very same time, they’re often literally securing oil and gas deals with the government leaders that are present at this event. Separate, but closely related, is the reality that we mentioned earlier, which is that COP, for several years running, has been hosted by petrostates. Mean, countries whose economies depend largely, if not singularly, on fossil fuels. Unsurprisingly, critics compare this to putting the fox in charge of the hen house, and that’s for good reason. Giving just one example, in 2023 the UK based Center for Climate reporting, found that COP 28 President Sultan Al Jubeir, who, in addition to being COP president, was also CEO of UAE national oil company, adnock, had secretly used the COP proceedings to push fossil fuel deals with other countries. Al Jubeir also notoriously said just before cop 28 began that there was, quote, “no science to support the necessity of a fossil fuel phase out.” Likewise, the authoritarian nature of recent COPs has put a significant damper on climate activism and the historically robust civil civil society presence that has marked many other COPs, which arguably can have a major effect on leaders mindsets amidst negotiations, the kind of return of civil society to COP 30 this year in Belem is probably one of the key plot lines to be looking out for. Last but not least of these perennial problems, though affecting COP is the consensus system, unlike in many other international forums, where decisions are often taken by a majority vote, at COP, every single decision must be adopted by consensus, with every country in attendance coming to an agreement. As you can imagine, this puts enormous strain on negotiators to find just the right actions that please everyone, which in turn, ultimately leads to that watered down language that we’ve discussed, which ultimately, unfortunately intends to preclude a lot of robust climate action that people arrive at COP hopeful they’ll be able to secure, but if a majority vote system were to be implemented instead, many countries, certainly the US included, as we’ve heard, would regard the COP process as a potential infringement on national security or national sovereignty, excuse me. And so conversations about perhaps changing the COP process to make the process more democratic, is more or less a non starter for a lot of the participants. There’s a fascinating piece in Carbon Brief, which we’ll share with you that explains how exactly we got to this situation, which is carbon histories, consensus on the consensus or, excuse me, history of the consensus system. I’m going to post that into chat.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you, Andy. Let’s get… I would like to open the last word to James. We have a question here from Maria McKenna that says the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action, and that somehow this narrative has been lost. I would love to see more analysis on these numbers along with the pressure campaign. I mean, I’m going to leave the pressure campaign aside. As journalists, I would love to hear more about the analysis, and I would like to ask you, what kind of stories would you recommend journalists to cover for this like the like research in this idea that the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action?

James Fahn: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s really important…there are a lot of studies out there showing that the cost of climate change and and how, you know, preventing climate change, in the end, creates more economic benefits, whether it’s reduce health risks or, you know, reduce costs of pollution and other things. So it’s good to have that solid background and to understand to look at the latest reports on what the costs of climate change are. There are usually lots of white papers and research studies that come out right around this time that update those numbers and so on, outlining the cost. So the problem is, like with a lot of environmental problems, the costs tend to be quite diffused over many millions, billions of people, and whereas the cost of investing in in mitigation is more concentrated and has to be put up front. So what’s what’s intriguing is that there is now a lot of interest from private investors in renewable energy. It’s been, you know, the price of solar and wind and batteries have come down, so now it’s very cost effective. It’s more cost effective to invest in these industries, and which, of course, have the benefit of in the long run, reducing emissions. So, you know, it’s interesting to look at. What investment deals we talked about, the investment deals that Al Jubeir was making for fossil fuels. What are the investment deals that are being made for renewable energy? And, you know, because now, and I, you know, we talked about how there’s this growing presence of fossil fuel industry people at the COP, and that is a problem, I think, is, you know, but if you want to look at the glass half full scenario, the fact is now the fossil fuel industry has to pay more attention to climate change. I think in the beginning, maybe they felt they could ignore it, but now they see that there is real competition from renewable renewable energy sources, and they need to pay more attention to what’s happening at the COPs and and within and within the broader climate change negotiations. So, you know, get, you know, get that background about, you know, what are the actual costs of climate change, and compare it to the cost of investing in renewable energy. And I think that can help you to produce compelling stories that you know show the cost effectiveness of preventing climate change.

Santiago Sáez: Thank you so much, James and we have three minutes past the hour. Thank you so much for everyone who has stayed until the end. I am very proud that most people stay. This is fantastic, and thank you so much. Andy, thank you James. Thank you David and Elena for helping us with the tech. Remember that we continue this series tomorrow at the same time, you can register there. David just shared the link. There you can go and register for tomorrow and Wednesday session. Tomorrow, we’ll have karo li Natalie, who is editor for InfoAmazonia, and will focus a lot on COP 30 and what it means for Brazil and the Amazon region and so on. So it’s going to be super, super interesting. Of course, please visit covering climate org and see everything we have there for you and reach out to us at training at covering climate now.org, if we can help you with anything. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day or your evening, wherever you are in the world, and hope to see you tomorrow. Bye.