Week One: In Rio De Janeiro

I spent my first week in Rio representing the America Is All In coalition at the Local Leaders Forum (LLF) – a celebration of climate leadership in cities that was elevated this year, given the 20^th anniversary of C40 Cities. As a signature event supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the production value was off the charts. Lots of high-profile mayors and city staff from around the world were in attendance, ensuring their city’s climate bona fides were well represented. The London mayor’s outspoken critique of Trump as a “climate wrecker” (vs. himself as a “climate defender) spread throughout the event and gained purchase as the phrase du jour. It’s not untrue, of course, but it was a bit surprising to hear someone be as outspoken as he was towards the American president. There was no fearful, political sugar-coating his message. 

The LLF was a good reminder, particularly in the US context, that mayors are not as beholden to the same political forces as some others may be. Clean air projects that directly improve the health of city residents will be popular with the constituents that mayors care about most. The primary, observable political force was that mayors were racing to outdo each other…“I see your car-free zone, and I raise you an EV bus fleet with a million newly planted trees”—the positive competitive flywheel of civic climate action.

Interestingly, while cities were the stars of the LLF (it was C40’s show, after all), there was relatively little said about the role of other sectors in either aligning with or supporting city climate goals. I get it, but it also seemed like a missed opportunity to highlight not only subnational government leadership but also the supportive sectoral infrastructure that could be mobilized to support civic goals. Working with higher education institutions, I’m clearly biased, but I also get a bit impatient with sectoral introspection and myopia when it comes to issues that could clearly benefit from cross-sectoral interventions, as we’ve written about in the past. And that was week one at the LLF in Rio.

Week Two: In Belem for COP30

Week two shifted gears up north to Belem for the big show: COP30.  I’ve written before about the three circles of COP and the different cultures that exist within each, and once again, I found it a good orienting framework for first-timers. This year, the “third circle” was particularly salient and vibrant. Belém is a gateway city to the Amazon, and the region’s rich culture was on full display. Additionally, for the first time in years, the civic life outside the badged zones was alive with marches, demonstrations, and protests occurring throughout the week. The third circle activity not only showed the vibrancy of life in an open society, but also stood in stark contrast to the closed regimes we had experienced since 2021 in Glasgow.

One other general reflection relates to the most frequent response I get when I tell people I went to the COP. A surprising number of friends will respond with, “So you’re burning a bunch of carbon to go to a meeting about not burning carbon?!” Fair enough. We live in a world of trade-offs and contradictions, and as much as we don’t want to admit it, our lives, just like the messiness of the COP process, are filled with them. 

The magic that happens at the COP isn’t in the planned activity. It’s in the things that are not predictable or predetermined. Who you end up standing next to in line can shape a new partnership for the next five years. Interactions with leaders in attendance, who are the most serious players in global climate politics, are unmatched. And the moral, emotional, and professional encouragement found in the worldwide community that attends is incredible. This is not to trivialize airline emissions. Of course, it is essential to be mindful of that cost. 

But I remember the group of airline executives at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh announcing a new global agreement on sustainable aviation fuels. There’s some greenwashing going on there, but you wouldn’t have had such an announcement happen without global frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and meetings like the COP.

Key Takeaways from COP30

1. Subnational entities of all types, not just subnational governments, are showing up for the US. In UN parlance, “subnational” refers specifically to the governments that exist below the national level. But there is another type of subnational actor: sectors such as health care, higher education, business, cultural institutions, etc., that exist in every country “below” the national level. When considering subnational climate action and climate solutions, it’s vital that all these subnational entities – governmental and non-governmental – are recognized as important players. They don’t all do the same thing, but they are all important if we are to align efforts at the necessary speed and scale. 
   
   The subnational action narrative at COP30, particularly in the US during a time when the national government is working against climate solutions, was an important one to tell. I spoke with a few international colleagues who believed that higher education was completely capitulating to Trump’s anti-climate agenda, given what they have been reading in the international news. Undoubtedly, US higher education has faced unprecedented attack, and this has stifled public announcements of climate action that we would usually highlight. In fact, we’ve been asked NOT to publish stories about some of our members’ successes due to fear of retaliation. 
   
   That doesn’t mean, however, that the sector’s climate work hasn’t continued. We published a new resource this fall documenting over 700 projects that are connected to climate action. We recently completed a nationwide survey that found that the majority of the American public considers higher education’s climate work very important. The narrative coming from the White House is not the country’s narrative, and it was particularly important at COP30 this year that we made this clear.
   
   
2. The mangoes told the real story of COP30 (and Rio!). Downtown Belem is filled with large, mature mango trees. And this time of year, it is mango season. We’d be walking from the bus or to dinner and have a startled jump when one of the green projectiles came smashing down on a cab roof or on the sidewalk in front of us. You could barely avoid slipping on the crushed fruit, depending on whether the deluge of rain had come to wash everything into the sewer system.
   
   I’ve always thought of mangoes as a delicacy, an exotic, juicy, sweet treat. In Belem, it’s literally street food…an abundant, albeit somewhat annoying, resource. In a matter of days, my perspective on the mango had totally shifted – not because I read a paper about it or listened to a panel about it, but because I experienced it. There are so many ways that we take our local resources for granted, or think that resources familiar to us are the only ones that matter.
   
   

Reflecting on these takeaways, I was taken back to Rio, where all the cities were celebrating themselves. What institutional resources were they overlooking? And then turning the magnifying glass around to our own work – what resources is higher education overlooking, given our own myopic tendencies? Can we view the global climate solution spaces, like the abundance of mangoes falling from the sky in Belém? Of course, we can. We need the curiosity to look, and the openness to see and taste what is often right in front of us.

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“How was COP29?” It’s the question on everyone’s mind for those of us who attended. I find it’s a complicated question to answer since there are many ways to approach it. After attending six COP conferences, I’ve found it helpful to set some goals in advance so that I don’t get overwhelmed, don’t try to do too much, and make the carbon burned from Boston to Baku make sense. 

My main goals for this year’s conference, in order of importance, were:

1. Understand how our domestic and international colleagues were responding to the  election results in the United States
2. Connect with higher education leaders to assess, anticipate, and plan subnational and international climate action in our sector
3. Represent Second Nature, presenting the ways our work is accelerating climate action in the US higher education sector at formal and informal side events and providing opportunities for our members to have a presence at COP
4. Be open to the serendipitous COP moments, inside and outside the venue, and experience different cultural contexts for impactful climate solutions.

In some ways, setting goals is the easy part. The obvious question after COP was how I did in meeting these goals, the harder part! Here’s my evaluation of how things went:

Goal 1: The big takeaway from my conversations about the election is that subnational governments (like cities and states) and other subnational entities (like higher education) will be critically important in any country where the national government is unwilling or unable to take a leading role. This points to the critical importance of our work both domestically and internationally. 

Goal 2. It was wonderful to connect with international colleagues to discuss what we call the “Network of Networks,” which includes higher education network leaders working on climate initiatives from around the world. The group is primarily focused on ensuring that higher education supports each other, the COP Presidency, and the UN Climate Champions. 

Goal 3. Second Nature co-hosted a panel at the America Is All In Pavilion and an official UN side event on the three missions of higher education. These events highlighted US and international institutions, including students from Ohio State University and the University of Connecticut, both of which are Second Nature member institutions. The events covered a wide range of successes and challenges our sector has had in driving climate action forward. Both events were well-attended, and we had some great follow-up discussions. 

Goal 4. Baku, Azerbaijan, is a unique place. Like many COPs, the local community puts its best foot forward, and one of the exciting things this year was the number of college students who welcomed us and helped navigate us through the venue each day. The country isn’t without its problems, but how can you not enjoy a place with both a carpet museum shaped like a carpet and a miniature book museum with the world’s smallest book  

COP was interesting, inspiring, challenging, and not a little exhausting…in short, everything I could hope for.

-Tim Carter, President, Second Nature

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We chatted between ourselves and the attendees about how we think about designing our respective societies, associations, and networks to best accomplish climate and sustainability goals.

One takeaway was that we need to challenge higher education’s current models for training, educating, and credentialing students if we want to see them make big changes in the world on these topics. There were lots of exciting ideas, and we look forward to putting them into action in the months ahead.

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It’s actually a tough one to answer, not only because of the jetlag and exhaustion that comes along with the long days and international travel, but because the conference actually isn’t a singular thing (you can check out our resource page to learn more about what COP formally is). 

This is my fifth COP and I’ve found the best way to answer the “how’d it go?” question is to think of it as three concentric circles, and how our small delegation of higher education leaders engages with these different experiences of the largest climate conference in the world.   

The Inner Circle: The Formal Negotiations 

The smallest circle represents the formal negotiations. These are driven by climate diplomats from every country working year-round to hammer out the technical details of the policy and implementation of this complex international climate agreement. Our delegation doesn’t spend much time in the formal negotiations as our access to the inner circle of the COP is as “Observers,” meaning that we can sit in on some negotiation sessions, but we’re just listening, not offering input. And, honestly, unless you are the wonkiest of the climate wonks, since these sessions are so technical, it’s hard to get excited about attending them even as they are very important. In the end, the Parties (the countries participating in COP) agreed in the “UAE Consensus” that we needed to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” 

My inner circle takeaways:

• First time transitioning away from fossil fuels in a COP decision text = good!
• Taking 28 years to get to this point = not great!
• Not including phase out or phase down language for all fossil fuels + many other loopholes (e.g. “transition fuels”, funding questions, accountability) = still lots of work to do!
  

The Second Circle: Side Events, Pavilions, and Hoopla

The second circle of the COP is the side events — some are more like side shows — in large and small pavilions hosted by countries, NGOs, and private businesses. As a small delegation of higher education leaders, this is where we spent most of our time. We were able to host and facilitate numerous panels with our presidents from Truckee Meadows Community College and Stony Brook University, and other senior higher education leaders discussing how our sector can continue to support global climate solutions on and off campus. 

We co-hosted a higher education pavilion — the first of its kind, as far as I can remember — and participated in receptions of our peers and colleagues from the international higher education community. This is always a great time to build and strengthen relationships that last far beyond the event itself. There is no way these partnerships, and ultimately the program activities resulting from them, could happen without face-to-face engagement. There is a ubiquitous critique that we burn fossil fuels to make these relationships happen, and that’s true. But, the outcomes resulting from these in-person meetings are a tradeoff, and one that is vital to the work we do.

The remarkable thing about this year’s “second circle” was the sheer magnitude of it. There were double the number of pavilions from 2022, which itself was a record. While COP has always been the center of the climate world for these two weeks, the second circle now has become a planet unto itself. 

My second circle takeaways:

• Platform opportunities for our delegation on the international stage = success!
• New relationships formed and existing relationships strengthened = absolutely!
• Contributing and supporting the global industrial climate trade show complex = disorienting?
  

The Third Circle: Marches, Protests, and Activism

This one I can keep very short: unlike in past years, this circle was basically non-existent. All the attendees knew protesting was a non-starter in the UAE, as large-scale civil society demonstrations are not allowed; that is just not something that happens there. There were a few highly curated chants of 10-15 people within a designated area of the badged zone, but nothing like what we saw in Glasgow or other previous COPs.

My third circle takeaways:

• Nothing to see here!

So that’s my reflection from the “three circle” perspective of COP28. 

Until next year, the work continues to implement the ambitions, large and small, that were agreed on these last couple of weeks. We’ll be sure higher education continues to have a key role in driving success.

Key Takeaways from COP28

Samantha Thomas
Climate Program Manager, Data and Evaluation, Second Nature

The debate on whether this COP was successful continues to highlight the urgency we’re all facing. I attended 33 sessions hosted during the first week of COP28 where I engaged with leaders across industries and communities that, unlike the final negotiations, gave me hope and confidence. There is a real sense of urgency and determination from some of our most brilliant leaders to end the use of fossil fuels and achieve sustainable and just development. Here are just a few of the takeaways from my first COP experience.

1. There is still a massive divide between scientific consensus to end fossil fuel extraction and the greenwashing of major oil company representatives defending a slow phase-out. This is a particularly visible debate as the number of oil and gas representatives was around 2,500 compared to 600 at last year’s COP.

2. The loss and damage fund was perhaps the most successful negotiation of the COP, with more than $700 million pledged. However, this amount does not yet cover the estimated losses.

3. Indigenous leaders continue to pave the way for just solutions that are developed by local communities, not by large corporations or governments. Through formal negotiations, demonstrations, and panels, it seemed like Indigenous voices were on the main stage, rather than sidelined.

4. There were dozens of new AI and big data tools launched at this COP including Climate Trace, a responsive map that uses satellite, sensor, and machine learning data to measure and identify top global polluters. The AI Innovation Grand Challenge was announced to identify and fund AI development of solutions in climate action, which is already being used to predict severe weather events, decrease resource consumption, and improve smart agriculture. 

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