Who Goes to COP29? Is Climate an Environmental Issue?

Who owns climate change issues? Is COP29 worth attending to ensure economic resilience? 

Working in a populous province in a South Asian country a few years ago, when I brought up climate adaptation, I kept being referred from irrigation or energy ministries to go talk to the environment ministry. I finally got into to see one of the senior staffers there. The official’s desk seemed small — especially considering how papers and books covered the entire surface in wobbling towers. We kept having to peer around stacks to be able to talk with each other. 

It seemed pretty obvious that any climate issue was a low priority for him on a personal and ministerial level. My sense was that he was an environmental policeman, applying regulations as he had time and energy to do so; don’t ask him to think.

Environment ministries generally are regulatory agencies — they apply legal frameworks; they do not necessarily develop them. A policy officer doesn’t write the laws that define murder as a crime. But that officer investigates potential murders and gathers evidence and suspects for prosecution. In recent years, some media and policymakers have described carbon as an atmospheric pollutant — which is a good framing for regulating emissions. Such a framing is not useful for adaptation and resilience, which are much more about how we choose to make adjustments in priorities given shifting climatic conditions. Adaptation and resilience are about choices and tradeoffs, not regulations per se. 

On some level, climate mitigation and climate adaptation don’t have a lot to do with each other: there’s not a single outcome or variable to trace for adaptation success, while we can broadly agree that lower emissions are important and most of our options are about how to manage the sources of those emissions and the rate of their decline over time.

If we were to go back to 1992, we needed the environment ministers to help with climate mitigation. But really the adaptation and resilience issues needed the finance and economic development ministers since they are best placed to consider how to frame and negotiate these tradeoffs. We needed central bankers, insurance companies, and trade specialists there too.

This week, I head for Baku and the UN climate conference — COP29. I’ve attended almost all of the climate COPs since 2009 and seen many changes over that period. One shift in the past year, however, is how governments talk about some of these meetings. Here in the US, climate professionals feel a lot of concern and discomfort in light of recent elections about how mitigation and/or adaptation will continue as a priority by national, state, and local government — as well as by US negotiators in Baku. It is a reasonable inference that the US will at least drop to lower level of engagement on climate issues relative to the past few years. The shift in emphasis is occurring just as countries like Brazil are stepping up their own intensity.

I can’t make predictions for the next few days, much less the next few years. But I have to assume that the latent tension between mitigation as a regulatory issue and adaptation as a strategy and executive issue will increase: finance and economic ministers are paying attention to resilience. They want to de-risk, and most of them want to do more than de-risking too. They want to embrace the richness of these concepts. And more of them are also recognizing that water is the tool and instrument for planning and implementation.

The Rio Conference seems like a distant memory — the resilience of economies to climate change was a theoretical concept at best at that time, with far more concern over the shift to non-carbon-emitting energy systems. A new generation of politicians and resource managers can see widespread evidence of the disruption within and across economies from climate impacts, with the promise of more to come regardless of what happens with our mitigation targets. The COP process is shifting to these newer issues. We will be there, looking for partners. 

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA