What Is Anyone Really Doing at COP?

The size of COP28 is hard to comprehend, even from the ground. More than 97,000 people have registered, according to the massive spreadsheet of expected participants, enough to populate a small city. The campus and its temporary denizens feel like a city too. Meetings are spread out across nearly 100 buildings, all with the freshly built feeling one expects from Dubai. During the day and into sunset, the main promenades look like the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan at rush hour; they spoke outward from a giant geodesic dome that emits spa-like tone sounds and glows different colors at night.

Thousands of the people here are country delegates, and thousands more are climate experts in various capacities—representatives from Indigenous communities in full traditional regalia, policy people, activists, nonprofits, journalists. At least 2,400 of them are fossil-fuel lobbyists, according to one estimate. Milk lobbyists are evidently also here, because two dairy-trade organizations held a side event on Tuesday to extoll the virtues of animal-sourced food. The aviation industry, the banking industry, the computer industry, and surely many others are also present. Only a fraction of those gathered here will be in the closed-door negotiating rooms where the international agreements are born. The rest will jostle at the sidelines, hold panels, and raise topics that will perhaps slither onto the official agenda at some future COP.

And so it has gone, since the very first, much smaller COP. The 28 years of COPing have produced a culture and acronym-heavy language specific to this gathering, an ecosystem that arises fully formed each year, like a crisp-dried resurrection fern doused in water. “Is this your first COP?” “I’ve been doing this since Madrid.” “Ah, I’ve been here since Marrakech” is a common way of starting conversations. Most people here have devoted their life and career to climate policy, and the overwhelming sense is that the efforts of this ephemeral city are in absolute earnest. People sit in groups of two or five on the carpeted floors, drinking coffee and talking intensely. Tiny, cash-strapped nations have sprung for official pavilions. The mood is serious and concentrated, the days long and exhausting.

Yet all of this earnestness has gotten the world very little. After a couple of days of watching tens of thousands of people go about this business, one might feel like shouting: What is everyone doing here? After nearly 30 years of COPs, we are globally in our worst position ever. The collective impetus toward self-preservation has been at least partly eclipsed by other interests. Emissions and fossil-fuel use are still going up. The United Nations declared this year the hottest on record as the meeting began. This COP in particular risks being overshadowed by its incongruous host: a national-oil-company executive in a petrostate who called an emergency press briefing on the meeting’s fifth day to explain away his two-week-old comment that phasing out fossil fuels would not get the world to its stated goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Climate science disagrees.) A few buildings down from that auditorium, the OPEC pavilion—housed in the same building as the Indigenous People’s Pavilion—gave out the organization’s monthly oil-market report to passersby. “Global oil market fundamentals remain strong despite exaggerated negative sentiments,” the cover read. Sunday was “Health Day” at COP, and at the pavilion’s entrance, someone had propped a small chalkboard on an art easel, with the words Health and Oil written in childlike block letters. I wondered about the art direction: Was it suggesting a connection between children’s health and oil, and, if so, what? A scathing article in the medical journal The Lancet had just called any COP28 agreement that did not include the phaseout of fossil fuels “health-washing” and “an act of negligence.”

Getting language about phasing out all fossil fuels into this year’s final agreement would be a major coup, but the bigwig countries are leaning against that outcome—or at least they were when negotiations began this week. But the people cloistered in the negotiating rooms still have seven days to work that out. I was reminded why we were all still doing this at a press conference on Monday with the Association of Small Island States, or AOSIS, an important negotiating bloc at COP that was instrumental in pushing for the loss-and-damage fund, which was launched on the first day of this meeting. The fund can be understood as a form of reparations, infusing the countries suffering the worst consequences of climate change with cash from those most responsible. Researchers estimate that losses and damages so far in 55 of the most climate-vulnerable economies total more than $500 billion; initial pledges into the fund were in the hundreds of millions. The U.S. said that it intends to give $17.5 million.

Michai Robertson, one of the lead negotiators for AOSIS and an environmental official for Antigua and Barbuda, told reporters that someone—he didn’t say who—had asked about his feelings on the fund; he replied that he was still waiting for follow-through. “That doesn’t sound like you’re being grateful,” the person replied. This was in a “diplomatic setting,” so Robertson gave a diplomatic answer, he said. But he was shocked enough that he spent the next two days thinking about the exchange and what it meant—that inside negotiating rooms, larger and wealthier countries were now tacitly saying to small islands and the least-developed states: “You got what you want. Now be quiet.”

But, he said, “we don’t want a loss-and-damage fund”; it is just simply necessary. In places such as Antigua and Barbuda, life is becoming more expensive and treacherous due to damage from climate-juiced storms, flooding, and drought. Robertson spent seven years of his career pushing for the creation of the fund, a depressing job at best. “No one chooses this out of wanting to do it,” he said. You just don’t have any other choice when you’re representing a place that may cease to be livable if the world breaches 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. “And then to be told that you should be grateful for it?”

“At this COP the message has to be not that we’re grateful, not that we’re going to be quiet, but that we’re going to ramp up the fight, because we absolutely cannot give up now,” Robertson said. For the many low-lying islands that make up AOSIS, the threat is truly existential, about basic survival. It’s also a preview of what the rest of the world is likely to face, only much later.

COP is the only venue where the tiniest nations can sit beside the world’s giants—the U.S., China, and the European Union—and be taken seriously on climate change. “The current process is not perfect, but is the only one available for us,” Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, the permanent representative of Samoa to the UN and the chair of the alliance, told me after the press conference. At the same time, he finds it ridiculous that issues are constantly pushed to the next COP, to the next year, when the threats that island states face are time-limited and always getting worse. “We always seem to be talking,” he said. “When you go home they say, ‘What the hell did you do there?’” he added. “Sometimes you feel embarrassed.”

This COP may be the last chance for the world to make commitments to keep warming at a threshold where many of these island states could survive. Already, some islands are planning to need to relocate people. Tuvalu made a deal with Australia to accept 280 Tuvaluans a year. The Marshall Islands surveyed its citizens and found that very few of them had any interest in leaving; the country released a national adaptation plan at COP today and is asking for $35 billion to give people a chance at being able to stay. If warming is permitted to accelerate, plans like these would only become more expensive. And, eventually, the people living in these places would all have to go somewhere else.

On Tuesday, a draft text of a document that will guide all countries’ climate policies for the next several years was released from inside those same negotiating rooms that Robertson was referring to. In its section on fossil fuels, it listed three options:

Arguably, only the first option, which the U.S. and several other major oil-producing countries currently oppose, offers any measure of protection for small island states.  Saudi Arabia has said it would “absolutely not” accept that language, and that stance alone would block it, given COP’s requirement for consensus. The oil producers generally prefer the second option, which is understood to codify abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage to be essentially attached to oil and gas drilling. That technology has yet to be proven to work at scale and would deal with only a small portion of emissions from fossil fuels, even if it could be scaled up to its maximum potential. Over the next week and a half, the final text will be hammered out. That’s why this conference exists, in the end—not for the panels, not for the side discussions, but for the talks happening in the closed rooms, where Samoa or Palau or Vanuatu or the Marshall Islands can make a case that they not be collateral damage in a world seemingly intent on ensuring the opposite.