Katowice COP 24 Weds, Dec 5
Day two of negotiations with some important side events!
Negotiations
Today started with our constituency meeting followed by the second negotiation for NDC guidance.
These negotiations move quickly and if you’re not paying attention to what’s happening, it’s easy to miss it. The first negotiations included ideas and points that likely game from discussions that the parties had behind closed doors late into the previous night.
Was interesting that Japan mentioned in a negotiation today that they’re staying a few hours from the convention center, so they can’t stay past about 8 pm and want even those inf inf infs (informal, informal, informals— as they were being referred to) to end around that time.
There was a second negotiation for the same item in the afternoon, and what must have been just an hour or two before that negotiation started, the co-facilitators (people helping manage and guide the negotiation) released a new draft of text.
It was interesting to see the negotiators for each country try and navigate the new texts and share all of their thoughts. I found it a bit unproductive, though, that the text was released without giving countries really enough time to fully review it. This is where the size of the delegations different countries brought was also important, since some had the capacity to read through everything while others had their negotiators focused on different issues throughout the day, hence, not having enough time.
I was sitting next to the Canadian negotiator during this session and saw him going through his notes, reading the text, writing things down and in the last 5 minutes of the session he got on the queue to speak, but didn’t have enough time. That was the other thing — they only had an hour to negotiate, which could have easily turned into two and made me a little confused why it wasn’t longer, given the urgency and amount of items to discuss.
During this, different parties also expressed some strong viewpoints on a few different topics, like the removal of certain sections that they didn’t want removed.
In all, felt lucky to continue to watch this item progress and get closer to a final text.
Side events
I also went to a side event on a climate-driven agenda by farmers and one on sustainable cities.
For the farmers — they basically launched a climate-driven agenda where farmers were banding together to work towards environmental protection. Have a lot of thoughts on this. In theory it sounds good, but their approaches might be more of a band aid — more efficient use of fertilizers instead of the elimination of them — and collaboration of what seemed like large scale farmers, but maybe leaving out the smaller producers.
Food and agriculture are dramatically important in both climate change and just the future, so there’s much to be discussed and was fun to think about some of the issues again, as I had done last spring.
The event on sustainable cities was stellar. Super exciting to see the work being done by different organizations to help cities.
[2010 numbers, so a bit outdated, but…] buildings, by themselves, are a byproduct of something like 6% of global emissions, and transportation accounts for 14%.
Recently, there has been an emergence of transparency on both city and building emissions which has put more pressure on them being energy-efficient. They have also set lofty goals — every building being built after 2030 being carbon neutral (meaning net zero emissions) and all buildings in the US being carbon neutral by 2050.
The combination of pressure, technology and the capacity for healthy buildings and transport networks makes me optimistic, but it’s definitely a challenge since it also requires heavy government involvement on the regulation end.
Highlights
- Watching the Canadian negotiator do his thing
- Getting excited about agriculture once again as well as cities
- Continuing to better understand these issues and the ways that negotiations work and parties are dealing with them
- Exciting to see the ourgency and collaboration taking place
