I have had the opportunity of attending both COP28 in Dubai and COP29 in Baku, as part of the Stockholm Environment Institute delegation. I spoke on a number of panels and roundtables and attended countless events and meetings related to my areas of interest: mobilising private finance and business for climate mitigation and development in low income countries.
The COP (the Conference of Parties) is the gathering of the Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), comprising representatives from all member states. They meet annually to assess progress, negotiate and adopt measures, and facilitate the implementation of commitments under the Convention. As the decision-making body of the Convention, COP serves as a platform for setting climate action goals, such as those outlined in the Paris Agreement, and for fostering international cooperation on climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as mobilising climate finance.
Traditionally, the COPs included the parties and observers, such as research institutes and advocacy groups, totalling 3 or 4 thousand delegates. In recent years, in parallel with this process, a proper trade fair started to develop around it and reached gargantuan proportions. For example, at COP28 in Dubai, 85 000 delegates attended the event throughout the two weeks in the so-called Blue Zone (that requires some effort to get into) with many more attending the open Green Zone. Slightly lower numbers have been recorded in Baku but the COP will likely break all records in Belem (Brazil) in 2025. For reference, the largest technology event in the world (the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) attracted almost 140,000 delegates in 2024.
The irony of having thousands of people fly from all over the world to some of the main oil and gas producing nations did not go unnoticed. At the same time, the fact that thousands of representatives of governments, business, universities, consumer groups, religious or youth organisations, and everything in between, find it worthwhile to take time, prepare content, materials, meetings, and thus play a part in the enormously complex task of mitigating and adapting to climate change, is also a sign that the challenge has been acknowledged by the whole of society. The world broadly agrees on why we need to act. There is some broad agreement on what needs to be done but vastly different visions on how to do it and especially by whom. In the meantime, the progress is real and should not be downplayed, even if it’s not sufficient. Renewables are being deployed at an unprecedented pace, innovation is happening and being piloted in hard to abate sectors, most countries in the world are moving in the right direction and, thanks to innovation and the economics that underpins it, green energy does indeed seem unstoppable at this point. And these achievements continued to happen while the world faced a pandemic, numerous violent conflicts, and geopolitical fragmentation.
What I try with my work and my attendance of such events is to make some sense of this complexity, understand as much as I can from the people working on challenging projects in challenging contexts and help others (policy makers and the public) understand more as well. I feel this will keep me busy for the foreseeable future.
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