COP 29 Blog
Baku, Azerbaijan, November 11th – 22nd, 2024.
Over the next two weeks, members of the University of Maine and Maine Law delegation will be following key negotiation streams including discussions linked to a new global goal for annual investments in climate policy, carbon trading mechanisms, adaptation for indigenous communities, and operationalizing the loss and damage fund.
The delegates attend the negotiations to: 1) learn more about international climate governance; 2) conduct research related to the negotiations; and occasionally 3) to contribute to the process through speaking engagements based on expertise.
This year’s delegation includes two faculty and five graduate students, each with unique interests and perspectives on the process. They include:
- Nicholas Micinski – Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Maine. FOCUS: climate migration and adaptation policy, particularly in the African Group of Nations.
- Anthony Moffa – Associate Professor of Environmental Law, University of Maine School of Law. FOCUS: carbon trading (voluntary and compliance markets), loss and damage (compensation for climate harms).
- Holly Fain – JD Candidate, Maine Law. FOCUS: indigenous community participation, adaptation.
- Hailey Rizzo – JD Candidate, Maine Law. FOCUS: loss and damage, small island states, oceans.
- Jamie Dalgleish – JD Candidate, Maine Law. FOCUS: oceans, marine food production, loss and damage.
- Clea Harrelson – PhD Candidate, Anthropology. FOCUS: just transition, national adaptation plans.
- Sarah Ball – Graduate Student, School of Policy and International Affairs. FOCUS: gender, climate mobility, just transition.
Please follow along on our COP29 Blog below for first-hand and real-time insights into the climate negotiations. Keep an eye out for new posts each day!
Dealing with Conflict
Clea Harrelson, UMaine Anthropology PhD student
Nov. 20, 2024
The 29th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (COP 29), brings together 198 Parties (197 countries plus the European Union) to discuss climate change. It’s the central mechanism that gave life to prominent climate agreements such as the one that came out of Paris in 2015, a platform for regularly meeting to discuss and coordinate climate actions, in addition to flashy, if consolatory, monetary pledges, and an arena in which countries grapple with global relationships. Unsurprisingly, it’s a space full of disagreement and compromise.
As leaders and experts from each country sit in negotiation rooms around sleek white tables arranged in a square, microphones click on and off with a pop as people respond to the facilitators or comments from other countries. Most interaction is coated in formal politeness (e.g. “Thank you to my colleagues for all the hours of work we have put into this text…) only to be followed by statements such as, “We’re not going to entertain any re-negotiation of this paragraph, so I suggest we move on…” Confrontation is not unusual but also not the only strategy to resolve conflict. Countries and facilitators use a suite of strategies to move negotiations forward.
While likely not an exhaustive list, I witnessed seven main ways people deal with being stuck on an issue or agenda item. First, people representing their countries are often master editors, scribbling notes on the fly, rearranging, combining, or re-writing items within minutes of disagreement being raised. Putting forward alternative text as a solution for disagreement is the most straightforward path towards consensus. In situations where the disagreements are too divergent to be smoothed over in open, miked conversation, delegations often take advantage of “huddles” before, after, and occasionally during a negotiation, gathering together around a few central speakers like a sports team listening deciding on the next play to quickly hear others’ opinions.
If huddles are too brief and more explaining or convincing is required to sway another group’s perspective, the facilitators or a country may suggest an “informal informal,” a mildly confusing and repetitive way to say that negotiators need more time to mingle and discuss in a setting even more informal than the one made possible through open negotiation meetings. In some instances where a group is struggling to make progress across parties, I’ve also witnessed facilitators offering, and even strongly suggesting, a way forward. As arbiters of procedure and with access to UNFCCC legal experts, facilitators may outwardly strive to be neutral but in fact represent key points of influence for any given negotiation.
Once an issue is deemed to be beyond the help of a facilitator or the parties themselves, the Presidency of any given COP may suggest or facilitate conversations among high-level officials from each country. This shifts responsibility for a country’s position on an issue up the governmental chain to people who are more likely to have the authority to compromise or suggest new alternatives than those actually at the table. Presidencies may also hold consultations themselves to speed progress or pressure countries to action. And finally, when all else fails, conflict is resolved only temporarily by pushing decisions to future meetings of other subsidiary bodies of the UNFCCC. While this last option may read as failure, groups working at COP may still be able to forward substantial amounts of draft text to these other meetings, meaning the work does not start over completely. None of these options are perfect and many happen simultaneously to one another, with negotiators smoothly switching between strategies.
The ability to navigate these processes is also clearly not equal among delegations. In one meeting I attended, the United States came with three support staff all working in a shared document while a negotiator from another country sat alone. I suspect this inequity in resources impacts some countries’ willingness to speak at all, as there are often only 5-8 people out of 50+ around any given table who are vocal in open meetings.
COP is fraught with all the same realities of the rest of our world, and thus disagreement in these spaces is inevitable given how differently people experience climate change and the vast differences among hopes for the future. Understanding what levers are possible to resolve immediate conflicts at COP, as a negotiator or an observer, is one way to try to survive the swirl of climate change discussions, even if it seems the swirl of COP29 may carry us away without real resolution in the end.
A Grassroots Experience at COP29 – A Focus on Earth’s Parties, Indigenous Peoples and Communities
Holly Fain, Maine Law
Nov. 19, 2024
Leading up to Week 1
My name is Holly Fain; I am in my final year at Maine Law. I have been studying law and community outreach work under the pathways of Environmental and Natural Resources Law, Youth Justice and Policy, Federal Indian Law, and Native American rights. I am a Mexican American (on my mother’s Indigenous side) and Shoshone Native American (on my father’s side), and co-chair of our Maine Law’s Native American Law Students Association.
I am thrilled to be attending COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, with a delegation to follow the negotiation track of the Global Goal on Adaptation and Article 6 drafting and revisions, specifically the thematic targets of qualitative measurements of Indigenous populations, climate impacts, and climate resilience. Under this track, I will be following content related to Indigenous frontline populations, conservation of natural resources, the utilization of Indigenous Knowledge, and the role of cultural heritage. Biodiversity, natural resources, Indigenous Knowledge, and Cultural Heritage are all subtopics of these thematic targets (See RINGO’S Key Issues to Watch at COP29).
While the world’s Indigenous Peoples make up less than 5% of the total human population, Indigenous populations manage and hold tenure over 25% of the world’s land surface and support about 80% of our global biodiversity. Biodiversity enables human and animal survival and with 80% of the world’s biodiversity being protected and stewarded by Indigenous groups, it is crucial that Indigenous populations, leaders, and activists are actively participating in climate negotiations. I want to study this representation and participation, and see what the outcomes will be during Week 1 of COP29.
Additionally, I am compelled to target qualitative and quantitative information to see how financial strategies are being leveraged and modified to support both environmental sustainability and nature-based solutions. I am setting out this Monday, November 11, to see if COP29’s Global Goal on Adaptation (the GGA Framework) or Finance discussions and negotiations are empowering fossil fuel industries and carbon markets or the populations who have experienced harm and vulnerable land rights. My intention was to observe where the money is flowing and if it is empowering emissions reductions and repairing/replenishing the resources and land for frontline populations or not. These components of COP’s Global Goal on Adaptation are rooted in the goals of contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of Article 7 of the Paris Agreement.
Indigenous communities are increasingly under environmental and financial distress. Indigenous people across the world are being disproportionately hit by the impacts of climate change on their ancestral lands. This environmental vulnerability is compounded by their reliance on traditional practices, connection to their land, and economy. Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge of looking after their land should be at the heart of climate policy-making, but they continue not to be. At the UNFCCC, Indigenous people are not credentialed as negotiating parties, which can severely limit their ability to impact the yearly outcomes of COP negotiations.
From many perspectives of Indigenous populations on the frontlines of oil and gas, hydrogen, CO2 pipeline infrastructure buildout, it is not just the populations who are harmed, but the damage to the Earth is resulting in true loss, and future generations of Indigenous populations are further endangered. At this rate, the future generations will not only be displaced, but continue to decrease.
Nature-based solutions, circular economics, and traditional practices have been a way of life for thousands of years of Indigenous peoples worldwide. This knowledge is key to climate action and the sharing of it with other communities is vital to the future of global adaptation. Indigenous peoples hold the potential to be policy guides and leaders in decision-making processes on climate action, yet the integration of their knowledge and practices into international and national programs and policies is not mainstream due to the framework of the UNFCCC. This is appalling to me, yet in a world focused on finance, gains from carbon markets, and rising economic powers, it is not surprising.
The UNFCCC’s Non-State Actors are Mother Earth’s Parties
Indigenous peoples are not credentialed to participate in climate negotiations, therefore they are not a party to COP negotiations. That said, I am coining these vital groups as EARTH’s PARTIES in my participation at COP. I am not shy, nor hesitant to approach anyone I meet in briefings, press conferences, pavilions, and even negotiation rooms, with this term of art. I hope I further fuel this end of environmental justice, human rights, and COP’s textual progress. This is going to be such a journey–here we go!
After attending a morning Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) meeting, I will be meeting with Rutgers University’s Professor of Sociology, Danielle Falzon, whom I was connected to through a RINGO webinar a few weeks ago. She presented information and tips for what to look out for in COP29’s Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) this year. I will be chatting with her about thematic tracks of adaptation, how the UAE framework of texts for adaptation and climate action have evolved since last year’s COP28 negotiation track. I will ask her how the framework is improving the ability to measure progress on the GGA and maintain accountability. These are loaded questions, but walking around the pavilions and having coffee as we chat will make the conversation pretty upbeat, I hope.
**Special gratitude to my family, as they keep up with my Maine Law adventures from their home in Texas. My Mama made me a blazer for my COP29 attendance. She made this for me with a personal touch of symbolism for our Native culture of the South, an emphasis on biodiversity, climate migration, and the fact that like the monarch butterfly, I too, had to make a move from the south to the northeast to fulfill my diverse needs.
Day Three – It’s One Planet
Hailey Rizzo, Maine Law
Nov. 14, 2024
“We are not here to beg . . . We are here to say, ‘it is small island developing states today, but it will be Spain tomorrow or Florida. It’s one planet.’”
– Dickon Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada
I attended a small portion of the second day of the Statements of the Heads of State, where I heard (1) the Prime Ministers of Tonga, Sao Tomé, Grenada, and the Cook Islands deliver their national statements. Many of them had the same message: that SIDS contribute very little to global emission levels but face the brunt of the impacts and it is time for operationalization of the loss and damages fund. Prime Minister Mitchell’s statement, however, was different.
Prime Minister Mitchell opened by informing us that for the first six months of the year Grenada experienced a fifteen-year drought, or the most severe water crisis in the last fifteen years. He continued by emphasizing that on the first day of the second half of the year Grenada was hit with a Category 5 Hurricane that devastated the island. In addition of calling for operationalization of the Loss and Damages Fund as many other SIDS did in their opening statements, Prime Minister Mitchell emphasized that the Fund is a “partnership for mutual benefit” because the mitigation and adaptation lessons learned in small island developing states presently can be shared with the rest of the world as it faces impacts from climate change in the future.
Prime Minister Mitchell re-emphasized that climate change is a global issue with global contributors and global impacts. The only solution is collaboration and communication and small island developing states bearing the brunt of these impacts are calling for a mutual partnership to protect their homes and prevent further impacts to the homes of the biggest contributors to climate change. SIDS are at COP29 to effect change, but more importantly to collaborate on a solution.
(1) I observed statements from heads of state from other countries as well, but for purposes of this blog post and my research at COP29 I am focusing on small island developing states (SIDS).
Day Two – What does “Full Operationalization” of the Loss & Damages Fund Really Mean? – Hailey Rizzo, Maine Law
Hailey Rizzo, Maine Law
Nov. 13, 2024
Around 5:00 PM on November 12, 2024, at an event entitled “COP29 Presidency signing ceremony: From Pledges to Action: Full Operationalization of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage,” Senior Managing Director of the World Bank, Axel van Trotsenburg, and the co-chairs of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, Jean-Christophe Donnellier and Richard Sherman, signed the Trustee Agreement and the Secretariat Housing Agreement, as well as the Host Country Agreement with the Republic of the Philippines. But what does this mean?
The Trustee Agreement and Secretariat Housing Agreement designate the World Bank as trustee for the Fund for the first four years as interim secretariat host. This means that the World Bank will be responsible for holding and disbursing funds until there is a permanent home for the Fund. As a trustee, the World Bank has no role in fundraising, deciding on fund allocations, or implementing and monitoring the projects the Fund finances. These responsibilities lie with the Fund Board. The Host Country Agreement means that the Philippines will host the Fund Board, which gives the Board “the legal personality and the legal capacity necessary for discharging its roles and functions.” (1)
While signing these agreements is undoubtedly a critical first step in disbursing funds, this is far from the “operationalization” of the Loss and Damages Fund that I was expecting when entering the signing event. What remains to be decided is how the funds will be disbursed, to what countries, in what amounts, what countries should contribute, how often they should contribute, and how much they should contribute.
Also at the ceremony, Sweden pledged approximately $19 million to the Fund and urged other countries to increase their contributions as well. Additionally, the COP27 and COP28 Presidents were commended for their work in getting the Loss and Damages Fund on the agenda and laying the foundation for the operationalization of the Fund at COP29. In her remarks, the COP28 President, emphasized how quickly the fund was agreed to and commended the Parties political momentum and cooperation. To this point, I want to emphasize that AOSIS has called for a mechanism to pay for loss and damages felt in small island developing states since the early 1990’s, so how quickly was the Fund really “operationalized”?
Finally, in his closing remarks, the Chief Negotiator for Azerbaijan at COP29 stated that “the damage has already been done . . . [but] this Fund represents a lifeline, particularly to our friends in small island developing states.” Although the fund was “operationalized” there remains much to negotiate at COP29, and in the meantime small island developing states continue to face the impacts of climate change.
- Language from the Draft Proposal of the President on Operationalization of the new funding arrangements, including the fund, for responding to loss and damage referred to in paragraphs 2–3 of decisions 2/CP.27 and 2/CMA.4 from Nov. 29, 2023. Available at https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cp2023_L1_cma2023_L1.pdf
Talking About What to Talk About
Prof. Anthony Moffa, Maine Law
Nov. 12, 2024
Day 1 of COP29 was marked by an unprecedented delay of the opening plenary. The plenary began as scheduled at 11AM and then promptly ground to a halt just a few items into the agenda. Ironically, the hold came in getting an agreement on item “2(a) – Adoption of the Agenda.” Then, we waited. For hours. The delays came like in an airport, first an hour at a time, then thirty minutes at a time. And finally the plenary reopened at 8PM.
It turned out there were two agenda-related issues holding things up. There had been a very late proposal by China and some others to add unilateral trade restrictions to the agenda. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, slated to go into full effect in just over a year, surely prompted this. Ultimately, the COP Presidency scheduled consultation on this topic during week one, not giving it a full agenda slot, but also not ignoring it. The other agenda issue had to do with some arcane cross-referencing between finance and global stocktake (GST) items. Paragraph 97 of the GST set up a work programme to review outcomes and happened to be physically located under the financing heading in the document. Some countries took contended that only finance outcomes should be the subject of the work programme, others interpet the mandate more broadly. The landing zone at 8PM kept the programme under finance on the official agenda with a footnote that says its placement there does not preclude discussion of any outcomes.
This was interesting and frustrating for all delegations, but even more so for our UMaine delegation because I had been tapped to represent the Research and Independent NGOs coalition (RINGO) at the opening plenary. As such, I prepared a statement to deliver during the two minutes of time our coalition was allocated to address the chairs and all of the parties. I am pictured below waiting for my opportunity to speak.
Eventually, I should have the opportunity to deliver the statement on behalf of RINGO to a reconvened session. When that happens is unclear. Regardless, my words on behalf of RINGO have been entered into the record as a written statement. They are reproduced below for ease of reference.
RINGO Constituency Statement for Combined Opening Plenaries COP29/CMP19/CMA6/SBI61/SBSTA61 11 November 2024
Thank you, Chairs, for the opportunity to address this opening plenary on behalf of the Research and Independent NGOs, or RINGO. My name is Anthony Moffa, and I am a professor and associate dean at the University of Maine School of Law.
Backed by science, COP28 ended with parties agreeing for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.” And yet, since then, there have been documented rises in both fossil fuel use and exports.
During this COP, we urge parties to continue to center science in decisionmaking and consider the ways our research community can support a transformational trajectory for a new renewable energy portfolio that ensures the security and resilience of people and nature.
As countries are currently engaged in establishing revised nationally determined contributions in response to the recent global stocktake, we urge parties to engage with diverse knowledge networks in establishing and enacting feasible and impactful solutions.
Fifteen years ago in Copenhagen, developed country parties committed to a collective goal of mobilizing 100 billion us dollars per year for climate action in developing countries. As parties sit down to set a more ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal at this COP, we emphasize the importance of acknowledging the needs of developing countries in three areas.
On mitigation, the rapid adoption of fossil-fuel free energy and transportation solutions will depend on continued innovations in technology, and functioning mechanisms for the transfer of that technology as well as methodologies for properly counting removals and avoidance under Article 6. The transition to renewable energies has already begun, as RINGOs we offer our expertise in navigating the continuously complex decision-making space.
On adaptation, parties will look to experts, including many RINGOs, to help define the indicators necessary to monitor progress towards the Global Goal on Adapation’s seven thematic targets. To implement new indicators swiftly and accurately in developing countries support from developed countries will be necessary.
Finally, this COP is situated in a unique time, where funding mechanisms are evolving and more necessary than ever before. The newly established loss and damage fund will need to be operationalized. At the same time, scaling up climate finance for mitigation, particularly renewable energy development, must be addressed at COP29. Furthermore, as the IPCC proves, a significant gap remains between current finance and what is needed to meet Paris Agreement goals.
At COP29, we urge Parties to act with the urgency and scope that science and research dictates is required. This involves rapidly increasing financing ambition through all available means across mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage.