At COP, there are enough official activities and side events to fill someone’s schedule at least five times over, and that doesn’t include all the time it takes to walk around the venue getting from event to event, running to the bathroom, grabbing a bite to eat. So one has to carefully consider the events they attend to cover the topics they want to know about while ensuring that they are not overbook or overexerting themselves.
For the short time we’ve been at COP25, I have been focusing on human rights issues. This can include climate-induced migration, food and water access, the umbrella term of loss, damage, and adaptation, and the inclusion of voices that have often been ignored, such as the voices of women, indigenous people, and disabled people, among many others. However, it can sometimes be hard to walk away with anything concrete to take home and share with those in my community.
This often comes down to two interconnected reasons. The first is that these sessions are filled with the powerful yet heartbreaking stories of people in developing countries, the ones most vulnerable to and currently struggling with climate change and climate events. Today, I heard from someone from Tuvalu, a small island that is a thin, long strip of land, which is slowly losing what little land they have due to rising tides. Their little island of around 10,000 people does not contribute to climate change, as they have no factories or major out putters of greenhouse gases, yet they are one of the first, and most devastated, victims of it. As you can imagine, countries like this do not have the resources to protect themselves from climate events. All they can share is story after story of the suffering they are enduring, crying out for richer and more powerful countries to take action to help them.
On the reverse side, reason number two is that those from developed countries are advocating for direct intervention and more human rights focused action, amplifying the voices of those from developed countries, yet there is no concrete means of support or action. One of the sessions I attended today was titled “Real Ambition, Real Zero, Real Solutions” yet there were very few real solutions offered during the event. I struggle with the fact that there are so many people here advocating for climate justice which is informed by human rights, indigenous voices, and the care for the most vulnerable, yet the power to enact this rests on the negotiators and the policy makers in those developed countries.
What this means for those of us back home is that while we do our individual actions to reduce waste and emissions, we must also engage with our policy makers to share the urgent nature of climate change and the importance of human rights focused justice. Particularly in the United States, one of the biggest polluters in the world, we have to urge Congress to remain engaged with our international community and start working on reducing our carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, while also supporting the struggling nations that are severely affected by climate events and climate change.