Context, Priorities, and Plans for COP29 – Climate Generation

So, we touched down in Baku! After a full day of travel and getting acclimated, we have begun to prepare for the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29). 

This is my fourth COP, and I have many thoughts and things to attend to, and yet I still don’t know much about what each day will look like for me just yet. It took me two of these conferences to figure out what it is I’m doing here and why, and three to figure out how I can do these things well and care for myself and others around me. 

I get to serve in the role as a house mother for the second year in a row with the Climate Generation delegation, and I am honored to be able to share what I know about this confusing, exciting, disheartening, invigorating, ridiculous, massive conference. I am excited to participate with folks who are experiencing it for the first time. To me, this means that part of my role is to make the house feel like home however I may and however folks need, offering an ear to vent to or get some questions answered from one of the various coalition spaces that I am in, and that, wherever I may, I should be connecting these brilliant folks with the global movement for climate justice. 

As many may know, I am the Director of Youth N’Power and the Youth N’Power Network, a year-round, apprenticeship-modeled program for youth in Minneapolis and a network of young folks that are learning and/or working on becoming community organizers that operate through the lens of Environmental Justice. In another capacity, I am the Environmental Justice Youth Program Director and Global Climate Justice Coordinator with MN Interfaith Power & Light. I also get the pleasure of holding space in the U.S. Fair Shares Collaborative and national Climate Reparations Camp. To be at the crux of these spaces where environment, relationships, and just transition intersect is both a challenge and a blessing. 

I have 10 apprentices in Minneapolis and 3 nationally, and this year, the second of my apprentices, Manny, is attending COP29 with our delegation. Now that I am starting to see connections between local and global movements, having some of the youth that I get to spend time with and mentor also learn to navigate this space feels really cool. And, it makes it clear how much is at stake and just how far behind our country is as it relates to the global movement to move towards a just future. 

The UNFCCC and the Conference of Parties can certainly be a nightmare. And, it can also be a place where you make lifelong friends, understand how folks are actualizing real solutions to overlapping crises (in addition to climate), and build a much-needed global community. 

I know in my spirit that building global community is the primary solution to these crises, because while we may be at a climate conference, the United Nations does not hold the solutions to what people and the planet experience.

Community holds the solutions. Community holds the solutions. Community holds the solutions. I say that as many times as I can, so that it becomes a concept that most people, especially Americans, understand. We have been led to believe that we must do individual action only in order to make practical change, and yet, we are at a conference where the COP29 host president in Azerbaijan has set up active deals to further fossil fuel production before day one even commences. 

I find myself wondering to what end we are supposed to organize towards while these oil tycoons and governments continue making deals that line their pockets and further rocket us towards our own demise. This is the stuff of nightmares. And yet, we persist? 

Today, on the day before the conference begins, Manny and I attended two meetings for coalition spaces: CAN-I (Climate Action Network International) and DCJ (The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice) members’ assembly. There were a few takeaways that I will be watching out for as the conference begins: CAN’s Fossil of the Day award — one of their major advocacy tools that call our UNFCCC parties (countries) blocking climate action and progress in negotiations based on the Network’s strategies and priorities. This is awarded to countries that are “doing their best at being the worst.” I know that the United States usually wins the award, and this adds to my personal shame about representing the country that is the highest historical emitter of Greenhouse Gases and the largest producer of Fossil Fuels, in the conference. 

We also learned of a number of planned actions in support of and solidarity with Palestine, calling for an end to the genocide (and all genocides happening globally at present). Any action within the COP space must be sanctioned by the U.N., and it is imperative that anyone reading this understands that genocide is very much so an environmental and climate issue. 

Knowing that some of the largest Environmental NGOs are standing in solidarity with oppressed and marginalized peoples and places reminds me why I do this work.

The second meeting we attended was for DCJ. We also talked through strategy, and the schedule of events for Palestine and other justice-focused initiatives. One of the scariest things i heard today, before the conference even begun, is that while we may be talking about staying below a 1.5 global average annual temperature increase, in actuality, we are looking at a 2 degree average increase by 2040 at the latest, and 3 degrees by the end of the century. That means that a child born today could live in a world that is unlivable, and the actions of our governments and these corporations are accelerating a future with an earth that can’t support life as we know it, or the lack of any future altogether. 

The last thing I’ll add as we go into this COP is that it is a climate finance year. In order to ensure that we have some hope for a future for all generations, peoples, and planet, the Global North needs to pay its Fair Share of climate finance to the Global South. That figure is something to the tune of $5 Trillion per year. For the U.S., our Fair Share is 46% of that, or 446 Billion Dollars, annually. 

This figure is one that has grown as polluting countries have continued to pollute and destroy all of existence, and the Global South calls for us to begin the process of reparation. The narratives surrounding reparations have been debated for too long, and while year after year and conference after conference, we somehow never can find the money to do so, our nation somehow finds the money to send so that atrocious harms can continue. 

This reality is one that most Americans refuse to understand, acknowledge, or talk about, and so in my fourth go-around, I hear the same two questions rising to the surface: Is the Global North going to pay its Fair Share and repair harm? For the Global South is paying from their own pockets and with their lives and livelihoods, and we still treat the climate crisis as a conversation for activists only, where I come from. Will we be able to see a future for the next seven generations, or will we fail time and again, to change our understanding of what needs to happen in the present? These are my thoughts as I go forth into Day 1 of Week 1, of a conference that has happened every year of my life since my birth, and still hasn’t figured out how to fix these issues.

Analyah is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.