COP29: Are climate summits working?

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Hello, it's COP time.

And as this year's annual climate summit comes around, this time in Azerbaijan, Inside Science asks, are annual climate change summits working?

What's the point of them?

And are they really doing enough?

Questions that go to the heart of how we solve the climate crisis in the face of yet more bleak environmental news.

In recent weeks, we've watched scenes of devastation and deadly flooding in parts of Spain.

And we've had a warning from the UN that the world is on track to warm by a catastrophic 3.1 degrees C by the end of the century, if we keep going as we are.

There seems to be a huge gulf going on between what is happening to limit global warming and what actually needs to happen.

Joining me to discuss this is a panel of experts.

We have Joanna DePledge from University of Cambridge, an expert on international climate negotiations.

We have Mark Maslin, climate change professor from University College London and Jim Watson, Professor of Energy Policy, also from UCL.

Welcome all.

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you all for being here.

The first UN COP summit was in 1995 so that's nearly 30 years of these talks.

Joanna, which of these summits has been most successful?

So, So which has been a significant step forward and why?

Oh, wow, that's a big question to get us going.

I think certainly in 1997 in Kyoto, governments agreed to legally binding emission targets for the richer nations, and that was a huge step forwards.

Then, of course, everyone would identify Paris.

That's the Paris Agreement that everyone knows about.

That again was a huge step forwards.

To that, we could add Glasgow, of course, when countries declared their second round of climate action plans.

And of course, we all hope that Baku in Azerbaijan this year will join

that list of successful COPs.

Jim, what was the Paris Agreement?

The important thing about the Paris Agreement, as well as agreeing a temperature goal of being well below two degrees and with the aspiration to get to one and a half, was a real change in philosophy for how the COPs worked and how different countries came together to make pledges to reduce emissions.

So it shifted from a philosophy that that said industrialized countries should take mandatory targets and should have to meet them to an approach that said all countries should put forward pledges to reduce their emissions in a way they felt was possible.

And what makes a good cop, Mark?

So I think a good COP is where there has been clear momentum.

So for if we take Paris, Paris was six years of work, one year of intense work by the French diplomats to get a huge announcement.

And sometimes people say, oh, what do the cops do?

But if you think about it, in popular culture, net zero, companies having to reduce their carbon footprint, talking about countries trying to do it, all of that comes from that Paris Agreement.

So all the stuff that we're looking at is driven by that very high level, even though we feel sometimes it's not quick enough, fast enough, or doing what we want.

So what are your predictions for this COP, the 29th UN COP summit in Azerbaijan?

Is it going to be one of those ones like Paris that goes down in history?

Mark?

This is about the money.

It's about the financing.

It's about how do we drive that ambition by moving finance from the developed world to the least developed countries to make sure that they avoid the fossil fuel development route completely.

They can just bypass it, go to renewable energy.

So yes, really important because it's about the money.

Joanna.

This is the most important COP probably since Paris.

In the climate world, finance is the key that unlocks or locks everything else.

If there is no ambitious deal on climate finance, then developing countries are unlikely to agree anything else.

It's all about the Benjamins, at which point I'd like to point out that Donald Trump is going to be the next President of America.

And I'm just wondering, Jim, how much of an impact that is going to have on proceedings?

If Trump does as what he says he would do, and similar to last time he was President, he will pull the US out of

not just the Paris Agreement, potentially the Convention on Climate Change altogether.

But it also means that that sends a signal to other countries, and rather than a signal that says please raise your ambition, we're raising m ours at this crucial time, as Joe said, both on ambition and on money,

I think that could be quite disruptive.

Joanna.

Yes, I mean I think this election result is definitely bad news for the climate.

It will have a real dampening effect, I think, in Baku.

We have to remember that the delegation negotiating there will still be the Biden administration, but it will be very much a lame-duck administration.

And unfortunately, Trump has said and last time he will not contribute a penny to either the Green Climate Fund for developing countries or to the running of the negotiations themselves.

So that is quite serious.

Mark?

So I think Trump will have an impact on the US.

But if we have a look at the last three or four sort of like presidencies, the amount of coal has dropped dramatically.

The switch to renewable energy and gas has been huge because it's economic.

It's actually driving the actual economy.

And so therefore it doesn't really make that much difference Trump coming in because what will happen is the economy will actually drive whatever is the cheapest energy source.

That's really interesting.

So you're saying that in his last term Trump talked the talk but didn't actually support coal and when he could have, Jim?

Yeah, I mean I looked at the data this morning.

The coal uses dropped dramatically in Trump won in his first term, despite all his rhetoric about supporting miners and bringing back mines.

It didn't happen.

And as Marx just said, that

was replaced largely by gas, but latterly, under the latter years of Trump and then into the Biden administration, rapid growth of renewables in the US as well.

If you look at US emissions, they sort of flatlined in the Trump's first term and then fell a lot because of the COVID pandemic.

And then under Biden, they have actually dropped.

So, again, you know, that's where the momentum is, as Mark said, you know, the economic momentum.

And there's no reason why that shouldn't continue.

It's really a question of the rate of change and will this slow down?

Jim Watson, energy policy expert, you've just hinted at

something about the COP process that makes it sound like a massive international game of chicken, where everyone is trying to say,

I'll do something slightly better, but only if everyone else kind of inches in the right direction because there's an economic cost to doing the right thing.

So I guess I want to drill down into how these summits actually

work.

You've all been to summits before.

I want each of you to give me your impression of COP in one word.

Jim, you first.

Chaotic.

Joanna?

I'd probably build on that.

I'd say organised chaos, but that eventually tends to lead to agreements.

Mark?

Frantic.

So I summed up Glasgow because I was there for the full two weeks.

It was like being at the FA Cup final

all the time for two solid weeks.

It took me months to recover.

The reason being is because it's so important.

There's so much to do.

There's so many people to meet to engage with and to actually try to lobby and support and it's just the noise sometimes is just overwhelming.

To me it's always been this big travelling circus that rolls into town and if you're if your town is hosting it all of the bedrooms get booked up everything gets more expensive.

Mark what is the main point of everyone coming together for this?

But the negotiations are going on all the time.

The COP meeting is just when all the leaders of the world and all the countries and organizations get together to try to actually make some top-line decisions.

And what's really interesting is that it's not just about environment because, guess what?

The World Bank is there, the IMF, you know, sort of the World Health Organization, they're all there.

And so, therefore, countries and businesses use it as a way of saying, right, we know everybody's going to be in town.

We can do other negotiations and other deals.

I mean, in Dubai, huge amount of oil and gas deals were done because everybody knew everybody was in town.

Okay, and did any of you see that when you were at a COP?

Oh, I think we've always seen that.

I mean, I think from the beginning, I've been to COP since since the 1990s, and it's always been an open secret that fossil fuel lobbyists have been there to try and slow down the process.

So, talking with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the US, depending on who the president was, literally to try and put spanners in the works.

So, who should be going?

Should people like Mark be going?

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, this is the place where everyone that

works on climate, that wants to see strong climate action, that's the big gathering for everybody that's focused on that.

Mark Maslin, climate change professor?

For me, one of the most important things is you have the negotiations, but round that in the blue zone, you have the pavilions.

This is where countries and international organisations show off what they're doing to combat climate change.

But we also have two pavilions which I think are incredibly important: the one which is the youth pavilion and the one which is the Indigenous Peoples Pavilion.

When you've got Indigenous people from the middle of the Amazon going, I'm suffering, this is what's happening, I'm trying to actually do something, what are you doing?

That's a very powerful message.

So those people should definitely still be there.

We're getting a sense of this circus.

You mentioned pavilion and lots of people milling about, but it's, as you said, Joanna, organised chaos.

If we can look back at last year's COP in Dubai as an example of what kind of agreements happened and whether they're effective, what are the headlines?

Who wants to give me the headlines from Dubai?

Joanna?

So, the main focus of Dubai was reaching a decision on the so-called global stock take.

And this is a review process that it was the first one, but it's going to happen every five years.

And it's, well, it does what it says on the tin.

It takes stock of progress in implementing the Paris Agreement.

And so, there was what's called a headline decision.

Chief among those was the

call to transition away from fossil fuels.

Now, it might sound very strange, but these kind of pronouncements on fossil fuels, on energy, are actually very rare in the climate change negotiations.

This is because some countries would really rather not have these things mentioned.

So, that was quite a big breakthrough.

Okay, so because transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems sounds pretty basic to me.

Am I wrong here, Mark?

You're not,

but I have to say, international negotiation is about the wording.

And up until Glasgow, it's all been about emissions and it's all been about greenhouse gases.

It's never actually referred to the causes, mainly fossil fuels.

So what it says is in the next decades, fossil fuels have to be history.

Now, we all agree with that.

The science agrees with that.

The problem is how fast?

Because people are still making a lot of money from fossil fuels.

And therefore, how do we actually move that money into renewables as quick as possible?

And this is where it comes down to that global game of chicken, right?

Because everyone's creeping along and everyone needs everyone else to be coming along with them, right, Jim?

Yeah, that's right.

But I think it does take a set of countries to be doing things which are commensurate with what the text says.

Take the UK, we've increased the amount of renewables in our electricity mix from around 2% in the year 2000 to around 50% now.

So that's a very big change for us.

You know, you can see trends in Germany, in the US, in China that are going in that kind of direction.

So you need that to underpin that change of language at the international level.

You mentioned the global game of chicken, which I think is very interesting.

I mean, that's precisely what the UN climate change regime is there to address.

This fear by some countries that if they move faster than others, then they will lose their economic competitiveness.

Okay.

And is there a big gulf between people agreeing the good things and people taking those policies back to their country and actually doing the good things?

There's laughter, I should say, in the room at this point.

Huge, because the problem is that it is very easy.

So, for example, in Paris, the wonderful negotiation that occurred with the small island nations with the EU support that got an aspirational target of keeping climate change to just 1.5 degrees was fantastic.

And everybody went, this is brilliant.

Then they stepped away and went, How do we do that?

And they went to the scientists and went, how do we do that?

And it was like, well, you need to get to net zero by 2050, and then you need to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for the rest of the century.

You know, it's sort of like it's doable, but you need to change everything.

So rhetoric is great and it also drives action.

But the problem is that when politicians go back home, you have to remember they're not just dealing with climate change.

They're dealing with poverty.

They're dealing with security issues.

They're dealing with all the other things that politicians have to deal with on a day-to-day basis at the same time going, oh, I'm going to try and actually deal with the energy system for the next 10 to 20 years.

So it's very difficult.

Jim?

I'd say, I think to be optimistic for a moment, although the one and a half degrees

goal that Mark mentioned is out of breach as far as most of us are concerned, I think.

1.5 is not alive.

I don't think it's alive.

I think we have to be fairly frank about that.

But it doesn't mean you don't want to get as close as possible to it, because every, as many people have said, every fraction of a degree matters.

But actually, many of those other issues Mark was talking about, energy security, which has been a huge issue in Europe, in the UK and Europe after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the energy price shock.

Actually, that's now pointing us in the direction, which is the same as reducing emissions.

So European emissions, for example, have dropped 9% in a year.

And it's partly because of the real momentum that

the energy price crisis and the invasion of Ukraine gave to policy there.

So I think in the past, if you go back 10, 15 years, those kind of issues would be pulling in two different directions.

Security would say do fossil fuels and climate change would say do renewables.

Now, both are pointing towards do more renewables and other forms of non-fossil energy.

Joanna?

Yeah, I would say decisions at the international level really do matter.

We're now in the situation where something like 80-90% of the world's countries actually have net zero targets.

There are climate laws all around the world, even in countries that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

And all this has basically been driven by the Paris Agreement, by the Kyoto Protocol before that, so by the international decisions.

It's true that there is a big implementation gap

between what is agreed internationally and what is done on the ground.

But as Mark says, these big picture headline decisions and treaties, they really do drive change.

This is Inside Science, and we're asking our annual climate change summits working.

Joining me are Joanna DePledge, an expert on international climate negotiations at the University of Cambridge, Mark Maslin, climate change professor from University College London, London, and Jim Watson, Professor of Energy Policy, also from UCL.

And just a reminder, if you have a big global issue you want us to tackle, please do send us a message at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Can we talk about the state of the climate now and where we are on targets?

We're nowhere near where we need to be, and that goes to the very heart of how well COP summits work, right?

Mark?

So

last year, twenty twenty three, temperatures hit 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

In the last twelve months, we've gone through the one point five degree target that was set as an aspirational target in twenty fifteen in Paris.

We've seen two hundred and twenty extreme weather events around the world last year.

So we're seeing the real impact of climate change.

And add to that, last year in 2023 was the most greenhouse gases ever emitted by humanity.

The only thing is, I say greenhouse gases, because carbon dioxide actually dropped slightly last year, giving us a little glimmer of hope.

But no, we haven't really turned the corner.

We haven't flattened the curve and we're certainly not dropping emissions.

And actually,

last year in Dubai and in Egypt and in Glasgow, they all called for a 45%

cut in global emissions by 2030.

That's in five years' time.

That's not going to happen.

In my opinion, which I think is shared by others, things would be a lot worse if we hadn't had the COP summits.

And if you look back to what projected temperature increase was,

say in the 2000s, that projected increase

was much higher, was significantly higher.

Jim?

If you're feeling optimistic about

where we are, where we might be on emissions, I think, I mean, I follow, for example, Chinese emissions quite closely with a group of researchers, and there's a lot of speculation that Chinese emissions are about peaking right now.

So they may actually drop this year compared to last year.

And of course, one year's data, you should never read too much into it.

But certainly in China, you can see the conditions for at least a plateau and the start of a fall.

The leadership in China are going to be really wary of saying anything about that.

Their pledge is we peak by 2030.

But potentially that change could happen, and that might open up the possibility of a major world economy actually come up with something more ambitious than peaking by 2030 and net zero by 2060, which is their target.

And so if that happens, that could actually start changing the game globally.

So what's the bottom line?

Is COP really working?

Jim?

It doesn't work fast enough.

It's not perfect.

But I do think overall, that idea of a ratchet mechanism, of trying to encourage other countries to do it, and it also provides that forum where you get those side deals and coalitions around phasing out coal, around more ambition on transport, around more ambition on afforestation.

So, you know,

I think if it didn't exist, you'd have to reinvent it.

Joanna?

I think the international COP negotiations basically do what they can.

Yeah?

I mean, they set headline targets like the two degrees 1.5.

They give a voice to the more vulnerable, and that's really important.

There, the small island states, the least developed countries can actually give their perspective on things.

It helps to raise awareness, all kinds of things.

The real problem is with the implementation at the national level.

If countries all implemented fully what they agreed to in the COP, then we would be in a much better space.

So as far as I'm concerned, the problem really isn't with the COP, although there's quite a lot I would reform.

The problem isn't with that.

The problem is with the national governments.

So should it all be legally binding then?

That sounds like the easiest way to solve this is to actually put more welly behind the words.

Yeah, but that doesn't really work.

You see, internationally, you can't really have a strong legally binding system.

I mean, we just don't have an international police force, we just don't have that structure that can actually impose,

you know, require, force countries to implement their obligations.

I mean, naming and shaming really is the best tool that we have.

And, Mark?

So for me, it's the least worst option.

It's a bit like democracy.

It's the worst political system apart from every other one we've ever tried.

But for me, I think the most important thing about COP is that every country has an equal voice.

And that's really important because

if you think about international politics, the COP negotiations are the only place that happens.

It doesn't happen in the UN because there's a Security Council.

It doesn't happen at the G8 because there's only eight countries there.

So it's a place where all the countries of the world have a voice, can negotiate, not just on climate change.

You'll find lots of other things that being negotiated at the same time.

And that's really important because that consensus model, even though it's too slow, is a really powerful way to go.

So, Joanna, Mark, Jim, one thing that you can change about COP meetings in the future.

What is it?

What would you do to make them better, more effective, Jim?

So, I would put a lot more emphasis on supporting the lower-income countries that are also, you know, as Mark said, on an equal basis with countries like the UK and the US in engaging in the negotiations.

They have small delegations, so they struggle to cover all the issues.

But I think crucially, for many years, they've been saying, well, if you really want us to develop in a low-carbon, sustainable way with all the benefits that could give, that's conditional on the financial support coming through.

You know, Joe was talking about that earlier, and that's really important.

So, we need much more emphasis on providing that financial support for participation, but also for implementing a more sustainable path to their economies.

Joanna, you get one tweak.

What is it?

Yeah, well, top of my wish list would be to reform the decision-making practice in the negotiations, which at the moment is all done by consensus.

Yeah, and what that means is just a small handful of countries can actually block more ambitious decisions.

We saw that in Glasgow, for example, with that famous phrase on coal.

Now, everyone will shake their heads at me and say that's an impossible ask, but I really do see that as one of the key things to pursue to actually introduce a voting rule to enable us to take stronger decisions going forwards.

And Mark?

So I would support both those, but I would limit the number of industry lobbyists, particularly from the fossil fuel industry, who are allowed to attend.

Dubai had a 100,000 hundred

people.

We do not need that number of people to actually have effective negotiations.

We need the core, we need the observers, and we need the, I would say, the organizations that really matter in climate change.

We don't need all of that lobbying that's going on every year.

You've been to multiple COPs.

What's your best story to share?

I think one of the most heartening was when I was in Egypt.

And of course, because of the country and the politics, there was no protest allowed outside the actual conference.

So what the UN did for the first time was allow protesters inside.

And for me, one of the most, I think, amazing scenes was seeing the UN security services with all their guns helping indigenous people from the Amazon put up their posters and keeping an eye on the Egyptian security people to make sure that those indigenous people were allowed to have the right to protest within the conference.

What a fabulous sounding scene.

Jim.

Yeah,

my scene, I think it's a strong memory from going to Cancun.

So that was a COP which was really trying to salvage the whole process after the disaster

earlier in Copenhagen.

And the international NGOs at the time, and I think they probably still do every day, they had something called Fossil of the Day and they'd name a country or a negotiating bloc as who was doing the least to help, if not the most to get in the way.

I remember.

I remember there was a Fossil of the Day at Copenhagen and I think Canada won it pretty much most days.

So, you know, naming and shaming clearly

important tool.

Joanna, one scene from a COP.

I think for me it was in 2017 in Bonn, but with Fiji holding the presidency and Trump One had just declared, in fact, had just withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.

But in Bonn, you had among these pavilions, you had the most huge, massive pavilion that had been hired by US civil society.

And by civil society, I mean US business,

US states, individual states, mayors, city governors.

And they were all there to declare that we're still in.

And there was this thing called America's Pledge.

And in a way, they were an alternative US delegation that was there to reassure the world that yes, Trump might have left Paris but there was still a huge groundswell of support in the US for climate action and that was really a kind of light in what was quite a dark period.

And what I've heard from previous successful cops is that what makes what tips negotiators into a more generous mindset is decent food and a decent cup of coffee and maybe decent weather.

Oh, so I'm sorry, coffee.

Coffee is the most essential thing.

These poor negotiators are negotiating sort of like every day.

I doubt if they ever sleep.

Weather, they don't see the weather, okay?

They're in a box.

Yeah, they're in a box, okay?

So.

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Yeah.

Well, you say that, but there's a very famous contrast in the climate negotiations between Copenhagen in 2009, there was a complete cataclysmic disaster, and the following year, the negotiations in Cancun and in Denmark, there was really bad food, there was very bad coffee, and there were people queuing literally in the snow.

And this did not help to improve people's moods.

It's not decisive, right?

But it can, you know, it can make a decision.

I can see that.

So, Joe, had nothing to do with Obama coming in and undoing the whole of the negotiations for two weeks at Copenhagen.

Well, you know, I mean, for my work, I interview a lot of negotiators, and yes, they do mention that, but every single one mentions the bad food, the rubbish weather, and the poor coffee, and the cold, and the terrible cold.

Yep, I was at Copenhagen, and

huge.

So, there were 3,000 journalists chasing precisely no story because there was nothing happening.

On that note, hope for good coffee.

Let's end this edition of Inside Science.

Thank you so much to my guests, Joanna DePledge, Mark Maslin, and Jim Watson.

Thank you all so much.

Absolute pleasure.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Ella Hubber, Sophie Ormiston, and Gerry Holt.

Technical production was by Gareth Tyrrell.

The show was made by BBC Wales and West.

If you want to test your climate change knowledge, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University to take the quiz.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.