Unpacking COP29: Financing the future

Introducing our third episode for Series 5 of 'UCL Generation One: The Climate Podcast' - focusing on COP29. Please see below for the transcript.

Welcome to Series 5 of our Generation One Podcast!

In this special episode hosts Mark Maslin and Simon Chin Yee give us behind the scenes insights and their verdicts on the outcome of COP29.

This COP was mainly about the money and went into extra time, but our hosts unpack it and take a deep dive into the key results with the help of special guests in the studio Priti Parikh, Professor of Infrastructure Engineering and International Development, at UCL’s Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction and Anoushka Jain, a UCL Politics and International Relations student and member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition. We even round off this episode with some post COP music therapy! Let the spine tingling music wash over you. It’s a new composition from the collaboration between UCL and the BBC Young Composer project.

UCL teamed up with the BBC Young Composer competition to inspire the winners to create brand new pieces based on UCL’s climate science. Composing for the Climate is a collaboration between UCL and the BBC as part of East Bank – the UK’s newest culture quarter on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park where UCL has a campus.

BBC music credits:

BBC Radio 3 website to hear the full pieces: BBC Radio 3 - BBC Proms - BBC Young Composer Winners: The Process and Music
Website for BBC Young Composer: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p030pblf

Views expressed by our guests are their own.

Listen to this episode on: SoundCloud / ApplePodcasts / Spotify

Transcript

Duration: 41:58

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
climate change, COP 29, financial commitments, hydrogen declaration, geopolitical tensions, infrastructure needs, methane emissions, youth voice, climate education, gender impact, renewable energy, intellectual property, climate finance, global south, transparency

SPEAKERS
Mark Maslin, Simon Chin-Yee, Professor Priti Parikh, Anoushka Jain

Audio clips 00:03
We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.

00:13
My entire life, I haven't known a world without climate change. When I was seven years old, I knew this was happening.

Professor Priti Parikh 00:20
The whole conversation was around, where is the dollar sign? Where is the money. This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face.

Mark Maslin 00:37
This is generation one from University College London, turning climate science and ideas into action.

Mark Maslin 00:51
Welcome back to UCL, generation one podcast and season five. I'm your host, Mark Maslin and I am a professor of Earth System Science here at UCL, which hopefully by now you know that I study climate change in the past, the present and the future,

Simon Chin-Yee 01:08
And I'm your fellow host, Dr Simon Chen Yi from UCL School of Public Policy, and my work on climate negotiations and environmental politics means I haven't slept since September. This episode comes to you hot off the presses from COP 29 which took place in Baku Azerbaijan, and from which Mark and I have both just returned. But before that, a little bit of this you.

Mark Maslin 01:46
Stirring stuff, and to find out why that has anything to do with UCL and cop 29 you'll have to keep listening to the end of the podcast. It's the way we keep you locked in.

Simon Chin-Yee 02:00
So if you've been following the news, you'll know that cop this year has been all about the money, specifically, how much richer nations are committing to pay the developing world for damages caused by climate change. The conference went into extra time, as delegates did, some tough negotiations, finally agreeing on the sum of $300 billion a year by 2035 but that was a far cry from the $1.3 trillion demanded by many developing countries. And while 300 billion might sound like a lot of money, let's do the math here. There's a trillion dollars missing. And both Nigeria and India made this very clear, that the developing country is saying that it's taking the lead with $300 billion till 2035 is a joke, and it's not something we should take lightly.

Audio clips
I do not think it's something we should clap our hands and force us to take it. I do not think so. I think we should rethink it.

This document is nothing more than an optical illusion. This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face. Therefore, we oppose the adoption of this document.

Mark Maslin 03:15
So that was the headline. But in this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the key themes and the targets of COP 29 now I have to say, Simon, you were there for the whole two weeks. Me, I sensed, well, I just turned up for the last few days and got out.

Very sensible. Mark, very sensible.

So what were the major themes that were going on there?

Simon Chin-Yee 03:36
For me, as you know, Mark, my work in shipping, in the maritime space, means that I actually was following negotiations in parallel with cop in terms of actual other actions being taken on the ground. There were some successes. For example, we had the call to action, the cop 29 hydrogen declaration, call for the global community to scale up hydrogen use in shipping, which meant that we had the players there, including the E fuel providers, the vessels and cargo owners, the ports, the manufacturers, over 50 companies and industry players signed up for this call to action. Well,

Mark Maslin 04:14
As you know, Simon, I'm always there to look at the geopolitics, to really understand which countries are doing what to each other. And for me, I think we can sum it up that China stepped up. USA were absent. India basically didn't turn up. And of course, Saudi Arabia tried to wreck the party. And I think that's going to be the theme of our podcast.

Simon Chin-Yee 04:39
It might be. And actually, if you think about it, if you've all the cops we've been to collectively, this one was potentially the most geopolitically fraught with wars going on in the world, the cost of living crisis that we're having. And of course, trying to figure out how we're going to solve the climate crisis.

Mark Maslin 04:55
Well, that leads us beautifully in because, of course, we have someone very special here. To help us unpack some of those details, we're joined by Priti Parikh, who is the professor of infrastructure engineering and international development at the UCL, very own Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. She attended cop with us and is part of the delegation and an expert on sustainable infrastructure. Priti has substantial in country experience in South Asia, Africa and UK, working with local governments, slum communities at both city and community scale. And I can tell everybody walking around COP, she seems to know absolutely everybody, and everybody seems to know her. So welcome pretty it's fantastic to have you on our podcast.

Professor Priti Parikh 05:44
Thank you, Mark. Long time, no see, yes,

Mark Maslin 05:46
We basically ate and went round the conference together. And as I said, Yeah, you know everybody.

Simon Chin-Yee 05:53
We also have Anoushka Jain here, a UCL Politics and International Relations student who was also at COP and a member of the UK Youth Climate Coalition. So welcome, Anoushka.

Anoushka: Hi. Thanks for having me.

This is all very fresh in our minds. We were all literally there last week. So let a couple of reflections on what you've been thinking about since COP Priti

Professor Priti Parikh 06:16
On my flight back, I was thinking of Abba, money, money, money. Because literally, that's how the whole week felt. I just felt that I just needed to go home and listen to Abba, because the whole conversation was around, where is the dollar sign? Where is the money? And it ended up in a very bitter battle between developing nations and developed nations, which meant that the discussions agreement, it took 33 hours longer than it should have.

Simon Chin-Yee 06:45
And now I have that song on a loop in my head. So thank you for that pretty What about you, Anoushka?

06:50
I think, on the flight back, I was just thinking about trying not to think about what had just happened, because we were hearing about the negotiations and the numbers and everything, and the numbers weren't high enough, in my opinion, and according to most of the global south countries that were there, and I think as activist groups, everybody was very disappointed and demoralized. So we were just trying to avoid that entire situation.

Simon Chin-Yee 07:13
And actually, Mark, we can ask you the same question

Mark Maslin 07:15
I have to say I was thinking about a the geopolitics, because this one just felt like it was doomed from the start. When you have the USA with a new, completely different agenda, you have the Saudis already agitating before it already started, and we're doing it in a country, Azerbaijan, which 90% of its external wealth comes from oil and gas, trying to host the climate conference to transition away from fossil fuel, it's just going to be difficult.

Simon Chin-Yee 07:54
I mean, honestly, you saw that in the first week right the president of COP called oil and gas a gift from God. That's how we started COP this year. Anyway, let's not go into the negatives of all of that right away, because let's move on to what pretty has been working on, which is infrastructure. So I was actually talking to people at COP, and I heard them complaining that there wasn't enough discussion around infrastructure.

Professor Priti Parikh 08:21
Well, I agree with the point that infrastructure does not feature enough in the agreement. And I was in the water pavilion, and the problem is people work in water, they just talk to each other. So I was having discussions with UNICEF to say, we need to talk to everyone. We cannot just be siloed in the water infrastructure sector. And if we compare water infrastructure to energy. Energy does seem to pop up in the agreement, though, the agreement does talk about transitional fuels, which means that we're still using fossil fuels to support nations. Now I can understand that for countries like India, where I grew up, a large proportion of the supply chains depend on coal, so it's not so easy to transition away, but having transitional fuels mainstream in the agreement means that it almost gives a license to subsidize fossil fuels, and it shifts their attention away from renewables. So I would have liked to seen a bit more attention on renewables, on those new technologies.

Mark Maslin 09:22
So Priti, I knew you got very excited about the agreement on methane. Can you tell us a little bit why methane is so important, but also why methane from waste?

Professor Priti Parikh 09:33
I got very excited about methane because, you know, when we talk about infrastructure, everyone talks about transportation and water and electricity, no one talks about what we do with garbage in our cities. So most of the garbage ends up in disposal sites, or landfill sites, which is responsible for a large proportion of methane emissions. So having a means of managing those emissions is really, really important, but it's a neglected area. As I said, no one wants to think about what cities do with their garbage, but as populations increase and with our lifestyle choices, we consume more and more and generate more and more waste. So having 30 nations join forces to agree on reducing methane emissions, therefore, is quite exciting. So a small part of me, the engineer in me, got very excited by that.

Simon Chin-Yee 10:21
Excellent, very good. At least. I like that. There are some positive things that have come out of this cop. So there is a lot of talk around negotiating these specific projects. And I know you work on specific infrastructure projects yourselves. What are developing countries? What were they arguing for? At COP. What were they demanding?

Professor Priti Parikh 10:41
So a couple of things. So developing nations need finance. The challenge Sub Saharan Africa faces is the cities are going to double in the next decade, partly due to migration, due to climate change. So climate refugees, population growth, a lot of other reasons. But the cities are going to double. They do not have infrastructure in the cities, in poor communities, so all of a sudden they've got this big investment they need to do. And hence developing countries are fighting to the bitter end for more resources. Also, there's an issue of IP. Who owns the IP of some of the green technologies? Intellectual property, intellectual property. Thank you. So who owns the intellectual property of some of those green solutions and whether they can be deployed in developing nations. So there were a lot of discussions on the sidelines around intellectual property those green technologies. Everyone claims the technologies are there, but where is the resource to deploy them at scale, and where is the resource to make them affordable. So I work on a solar energy project in Sub Saharan Africa, and most of the work on renewables is driven by private sector, but they are finding it difficult to sustain themselves because they work with populations who use the amount of electricity we need to light this studio here for two hours. That's the total electricity they consume in a day. So thinking about how to make those business models affordable for people who use tiny amounts of electricity, and that's where the subsidies need to go. So there was a big disappointment around the lack of finance.

Simon Chin-Yee 12:15
There was complaints around this 300 billion it's not just pledges from governments. There's a lot of multilateral banks that are funding into this, which developing countries like, I think India specifically said, but we pay into that. So are we paying into that?

Professor Priti Parikh 12:31
To ourselves, it almost feels like that. I mean, it's a step. Don't get me wrong. It's a step in the right direction to have multilateral banks chipping into this, but a lot of countries will argue that we're paying into that also, whether they are grants, over that they are loans. If they are loans, they come with high interest rates. Quite often, those grants are used to hire consultants from developed nations. So quite often you see that that money actually goes back to their countries. So what developing nations need is the authority, or the kind of independent body where they can decide what projects they need in their country and how those resources should be allocated. I mean, the loss and damage fund got operationalized, but I'm still not very clear on the flow of money, where it's going to go, what projects can be implemented. So those things need to be

Simon Chin-Yee 13:19
clear, but there's simply not enough money in the any Loss and Damage fund you can operation, operationalize it all you want, but if there's nothing in it to finance the projects, then what are we doing?

Mark Maslin 13:28
So pretty as you know, I am always inspired by your work on informal settlement and slums. Can I ask you at COP 29 Did you see any shift in the way that organizations and governments are actually approaching them in a different way, or is it more of the same?

Professor Priti Parikh 13:46
It's more of the same. So I joined in week two to make sure I was there for the urbanization day, which is when a lot of conversations happen around what we call informal settlements. So people who do not own land, but they still need human conditions, housing, infrastructure, those basic services and the tragedies those communities get flooded the most, so they bear the burden of climate change, but they have next to nothing in terms of emissions, and the conversations are still stuck in old school style of Let's help those poor people, but where are the projects? Where are the sustainable business models, where it's a pathway where those communities can develop their own infrastructure, and those communities have indigenous knowledge on nature based solutions, which is more sustainable for the environment, but there's no opportunity to tap into that knowledge, every nature based project seems to be a pilot. We for the last 10 years, we seem to be trialing pilots, but we know that deforestation projects work. We know that community driven wetlands projects work. So it's a matter of scaling them up and putting serious money behind it. But there seems to be. Kind of lack of political will to do so. And

Simon Chin-Yee 15:02
What about the technologies behind that? Actually, we have a lot of technologies, but are these community projects that you are talking about? Do they have access to them? And do spaces like cop allow for the sharing, because we're supposed to be sharing technology, and know how this entire time.

Professor Priti Parikh 15:19
So in some of those communities, it's quite low tech, so it's about following nature and making sure that water can flow up to down, which is how it naturally happens in building drains and channels and wetlands, which can soak in water. So it's about simple technologies which can make our cities more spongy, so that city becomes a sponge, and it soaks in water. But at a larger scale, when you think about city infrastructure to scale, that's when you need some of those technical solutions. That's where you need innovation on how you're collecting water wastewater, how you're treating wastewater, cleaning it up, putting it back. So that's where you need some of the screen technologies

Mark Maslin 16:01
And cities becoming spongy. I like that. So Annie Scott, I know that it's been a horrendous week for you, because even though you've been at COP 29 you got your coat and your wallet stolen in Baku. And then, of course, you come back to safe London and somebody tries to knock you off your bike in a car. So I'm amazed that you've made it here. And thank you. So can I ask about your experience, because you represented the UK Youth Climate Coalition. Can you explain what they are, and why were you at Baku?

Anoushka Jain 16:35
All right, firstly, thank you. It has been a difficult week, but I am glad to be here. So the UK Youth Climate Coalition is a group of young people across the UK and sometimes globally, which work together to empower young people to be more involved in climate justice. And one of the ways we do that is through cop so as a part of the cop working group, what I do is that we send around eight to 10 people to go up every year to work on whatever campaign we have at the moment. So right now, this year, we were campaigning on conflict of interest, which is basically to keep it really simple about getting fossil fuel lobbyists out of international climate spaces. Because this year, there was 1773 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP that we know of, and obviously, because of the location, there were many more. And just looking at that, and these fossil fuel lobbyists are using these spaces to negotiate with world leaders, to make oil deals happen, to sell fossil fuels to world leaders. And that feels so incredibly counterintuitive, and I would say ironic, but it's due on the nose for that, quite honestly.

Mark Maslin 17:41
Well, Anoushka,I think one of the problems is it's now really difficult to see who are the lobbyists. I mean, you're too young to remember, but in Kyoto, the actual oil guys were going around with Texan hats on, so you could spot them a mile off. That no longer is the case. They just blend in and you have no idea who is talking to who.

Simon Chin-Yee 18:01
And as we've seen over multiple COPs, it seems like the youth voice is growing year on year. But do you think that your voice, or the voice of the youth, is being heard in COPs?

Anoushka Jain 18:14
I think that's a great question that everybody always asks youth activists. I will say, as a young person, people are always talking about how inspiring young people are and how brave we are, and how we're gonna fix the world. But the thing is, it feels very tokenized, because young people are not we're being used to further political causes, but we're not actually allowed access to decision making spaces or allowed to be involved in negotiations. And obviously politicians and negotiators typically tend to be a lot older, especially in their 50s or 60s, and at that point, they're just not as invested in the climate movement as young people are, because my entire life, I haven't known a world without climate change. When I was seven years old, I knew this was happening, and I just think the location was such an interesting choice, because obviously there's a lot of issues with free speech and protest and demonstrations in a way that we don't have in the UK, for example, which is obviously very lucky, but in places like Azerbaijan, it makes it really hard for young people to say anything, just because the way we want to say things is a lot angrier and a lot more passionate and a lot less politically correct or politically accurate or acceptable. So I just feel like the anger that young people have wasn't isn't able to be translated into actual policy spaces like up.

Mark Maslin 19:30
I mean, I have to say the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, he actually reflected that here. I mean, I have a quote here that said, you have every right to be angry. I'm angry too. I mean, I noticed that the UK was the first out of 196 countries to sign the universal youth clause. Do you think that's going to make a difference?

Anoushka Jain 19:51
So on the very last day of COP, we managed to snag a meeting with Ed Miliband where he talked to us about the youth clause, because as young activists. Yes, we want more access to these spaces. So the youth clause, just to give a brief introduction to what that is. Firstly, it talks about three things. Firstly, on climate education, and how do we get young people more access to climate education in a way that helps them solve problems and not just tells them, hey, the world is burning and you can't do anything about it. Secondly, it gives us access to decision making rooms, and allows our voices to be heard in the way that they really haven't in the past. And lastly, it just allows us to be more present different countries, to interact with each other and create different kinds of groups and coalitions and ways to create change.

Mark Maslin 20:34
I mean, I love that, because I think those connections between young people across the world, those are going to last your lifetime. And therefore, when you are all in power, those are going to be the networks that really matter.

Simon Chin-Yee 20:48
So Anoushka, I had met lots and lots of students at COP actually, more than I ever have before. And there were even multiple UCL students that were there. And what I find fascinating is the ones that even haven't even started their degrees, yet are looking at degrees in climate, whether it be in a technical capacity, as a lawyer or even as the negotiators. Now I wouldn't presume to know where you are seeing your career in the future, but from your perspective, because you are in my department and you're taking a degree in politics and international relations. So how do you think the dynamics within the in the negotiations themselves, are reflected in your studies, or vice versa, how you can use your studies in this in an applicable way to these negotiations?

Anoushka Jain 21:32
I do think over the last year, I've gained a lot of knowledge and skills that have allowed me to know what I'm doing in this space I definitely did not have last year, when I was hearing what the bay and I was hearing all these terms about negotiators and negotiating groups and international climate spaces. So I think over the last year, I've learned so much through UCL and my degree, in particular, especially since I worked on a change makers project over the year with Dr Lisa van Hala, which was about incorporating climate education into every aspect of the political science degree. So for example, if we're talking about migration, let's talk about climate change migration. Or if we're talking about global security, let's talk about the global security challenge of climate change, because everything political is going to involve climate change in the next 10 years, and that's something that's so relevant for every student to be involved in, and not just our department, but across Humanities and Social Sciences and the physical sciences, I do think that it's so important to be considerate of the fact that get like students today want their education to prepare them for the future, and the future is climate change. And actually not the future, but the present is climate change.

Professor Priti Parikh 22:37
I mean, having heard Anoushka, I mean I feel so inspired as an academic, I mean, one of the privileges we have is working with inspiring students who are so deeply passionate about climate change, and for me, I struggle with the unfairness of it all that as a generation, we, frankly speaking, messed it up, and now they are the ones who are mopping up the mess here. But we also have to remember that there are parts of the world where children barely get themselves to schools or universities, in part due to climate change, because a lot of them migrate to different parts of the country, do not have access to education. So I think education is a good entry point, but we also need to look at the fundamentals of how to support youth and give them the basics as well. So it's just a reminder that not all youth are able to engage in debates on climate change because they do not have access to those points of knowledge.

Anoushka Jain 23:31
Oh definitely, as somebody who's originally from India and has access to climate space through global south and global North channels, as much as that, I hate that terminology. I think it's such an obvious difference, because when you're somebody from the global north, and my organization is from the global north, you have so much more access. Negotiators are willing to talk to you, world leaders are willing to talk to you and have a conversation with you. You are allowed into spaces that I never got to see when I was from the Global South. And since I do have this unique access, as you try to champion global south causes through the access I have, I just do agree with you completely that it's important to acknowledge that we're not hearing so many voices. Because it is such a privilege to be able to go to co op. It is such a privilege to be able to get up and firstly, pay for flights to go up, sustain yourself when you're a different country for two weeks, get visas, get access, get a got badge, and the voices we hear are the most privileged within the climate space, and that's something we should establish from the ground up.

Simon Chin-Yee 24:29
And a lot of those places are it's not just that. It's harder to get to. You have to get there in advance because who you're negotiating with, you're negotiating with your fellow countries that are not you're not necessarily able to be in touch with it's much more expensive to get there because you're further away. This is all of these things. I was on a call earlier today, Anushka, and what you just said just came up. Because everyone was like, Okay, what is the relevance of COP? Let's be critical. And I was like, Okay, let's take a step back and realize we're doing that from a UK perspective, if you're looking at the relevance of these cops. Arms and climate change from someone from Fiji, from Ghana, from Brazil, even, that's going to be a very different perspective of what's happening here in these spaces, and that will go specifically for the youth as well. And the access to to even understanding, not understanding, I won't want to say that access to to being part of the discussion that that's happening halfway across the world.

Mark Maslin 25:23
But I think it's really interesting that this cop, they acknowledge that so a lot of organizations in the West, universities, NGOs, had limited tickets, because what they were trying to do was shift from Western organizations much more to the south. Now, whether that worked or not is another matter. What's interesting though, is that you could feel that COP 29 was a failure by the middle because people were already talking about Brazil. They're all talking about COP 30 as if COP 29 had already finished. And that's interesting because, of course, Brazil has set this up as the youth cop. So I want to ask you, nishka, what do you feel that Brazil can do differently to really pick up on the youth voice and empower them in a cop in the middle of Brazil?

Anoushka Jain 26:17
It's really frustrating to see this happen at every cop. Because every COP, people are like, let's let's go to the next stop, and let's think about SPS and bond, and let's think about the next six months or the next year. And I just think that attitude is very frustrating, because it assumes that we have the time to push climate change forward, and it assumes that we can do that, especially for global south countries. And I don't think a lot of people, especially from Global North places, understand that, because what climate change looks like in the UK, for example, is very different from what it looks like in Vanuatu or Fiji or even India. And just we need to understand that we can't keep pushing it back on the youth side of things. I think it's very interesting that every cop has this little label on it and a very specific angle that they want to take on that I don't think that works, or we should be having that just because every cop should be talking about all of these issues and doing so, or saying that, Oh, this is the finance cop. So we can only talk about finances this year and not next year, or saying next year's the youth COP. So we can't talk about youth this year or the year after that. It kind of assumes that all these issues aren't interconnected, and climate change isn't super intersectional, which it definitely is.

Professor Priti Parikh 27:41
I like the point that the focus on climate finance, in a way, was possibly unhelpful, because a we didn't raise the money we needed to. So we spent two weeks haggling over money to know avail. But then it meant to distract it from other conversations that could have been had on kind of energy transition, on inclusion, gender, kind of a more multi sectoral approach to climate change. So I totally agree that sometimes the themes do become a bit of a distraction.

Anoushka Jain 28:08
I think that's really interesting, because during the closing plenary, one of the countries, and I'm not sure I remember which one said, why are we talking about gender? When at COP, why or why is this something that keeps coming up? And I think that's really interesting, because climate change impacts women, and especially women of color in global south countries to such a huge extent and a much bigger way than it does men. And for example, women are 80% more likely to be impacted by climate change based migration and things like that. And that is such a real issue, and the differences are incredible and so huge that it feels really ridiculous to not talk about these issues.

Professor Priti Parikh 28:44
No, absolutely. Because if there's flooding, women are less likely to be able to evacuate themselves safely, or if they do, they are looking out for their children first. Or if they have to go and collect water, they collect water in extreme heat, so they're likely to suffer from dehydration. So if you take every point of the day, it's actually women who bear the burden of climate change. And as an engineer, I'm going to add of poor infrastructure and housing as well. And if you think about that intersection, that's where you do need to use a gender lens. Really, you

UCL Minds 29:15
are listening to UCL generation one turning science and ideas into climate action.

Mark Maslin 29:20
So at the beginning of this podcast, I mentioned that this seemed to be the cop where China stepped up. USA said goodbye, India didn't turn up, and Saudi Arabia tried to wreck the party. Now I'm going to ask Anushka, hey, you're an international relations student, and pretty you've been to many cops. What were your take home from the geopolitics? Did this matter?

Professor Priti Parikh 29:46
Well, I know a lot of people think that cops is a bit of cop out and waste of time, but the thing about cop is it's one of the few kind of events or conferences where you can convene around. 96 countries and their leadership. And it was interesting walking down the pavidians, I could see a pavilion for Ukraine and Russia. So it has that influence if you use it wisely and in terms of geopolitics. What I found interesting is that whilst us was quite low key after the elections, clearly, because Donald Trump doesn't seem to see climate crisis as priority, China was really stepping up. It had changed its stance, its tone. It was really looking to influence support the negotiations in the background. So it feels like whilst us might be stepping away from the climate crisis, there will be other major players stepping up,

Simon Chin-Yee 30:45
But Priti we've been here before with this exact same person, right? And so the US has withdrawn from the Paris agreement before they will probably withdraw again. But there are a few things that give me a little hope that the US isn't completely abandoning this. The first is that when that happened, the first time, a whole movement started, and it included industry like Google and Apple, included cities, included states, for example, that were pledging that they were still going to move forward. Now, whether they're going to do this again, it remains to be seen. But that did happen, also the US, whether they like it or not, are part of the global value chains. They can't just pull out of economic mechanisms that are there. And when there are measures being put in place to decarbonize these particular sectors, the US will have to either stop trading with China, which they won't want to do, or they're going to stay in I don't have a magic crystal ball here, but there it is not yet a complete disaster.

Mark Maslin 31:47
So I'm going to add that again, if we look at the first term of Trump, even though there was strong support from him and others for coal, the actual amount of coal produced and used in America dropped dramatically. And again, the problem is that even the prison cannot go against global economic trends, which is towards renewables and away from fossil fuels. The problem is he can probably slow it down.

Anouska Jain 32:17
I understand all these different perspectives. I do slightly disagree in the sense of, oh, when we talk about Trump cannot and will not do these things, it kind of assumes a level of rationality and logic that we haven't really seen this term and haven't seen in the plans or even with Project 2025 even though he's distanced himself from it, quote, unquote, we just haven't seen that. And even if the entire world is doing one thing, and all of his advisors, who at this point are probably going to be loyalists and Trump supporters aren't going to go against him, which is my one concern, that we might not see the same kind of administration. We're going to see a much stronger administration based off of, well, everything he's said so far, and just going off of that alone. I'm not really holding out hope, but I am hoping, like really said, that other countries will step up, and industries will step up in a way that we kind of do need, because a lot of industries are now acknowledging the fact that without renewable energy is cheaper longer term. And if you look at five year plans or 10 year plans, it makes sense to invest in renewable energy compared to fossil fuels, which are going to get more and more expensive.

Simon Chin-Yee 33:23
I fell into the trap of assuming a rationalist government,

Mark Maslin 33:30
Classic academic there!. So I'm going to ask all three of you cops, some of them in good some of them are bad, and some of them in complete failure. If you had a magic wand, you had Simon's magic wand, what would you do to change cops in the future to make them work better? Who's going to go first?

Professor Priti Parikh 33:50
I can go first. So if I had Simon's magic wand, I would make the negotiation. If I had Simon's crystal ball, I would make the negotiations more transparent, so that they open to public scrutiny, because at the moment, it feels like you do not know what is going on behind closed doors. You do not know what the power blocks are. You can speculate and you can guess. But if it was open to public, then we can all provide scrutiny. But also, as an academic, I feel that we are scientists, we can also offer good science and support and evidence for the negotiations as well. So Anushka,

Mark Maslin 34:28
I'm going to pass the crystal ball to you. Fantastic.

Anouska Jain 34:30
Firstly, Priti stole my answer, because I was definitely going to say transparency and accountability. But just adding on to that, two things. Firstly, I think there needs to be more ambition, especially within the presidency, they need to be doing a lot more to make sure countries agree on things that are a lot more ambitious than where we are now, because everybody acknowledges it, but nobody's doing the work to get there. So it's a bit counterintuitive. Secondly, I do think global south countries and island nations and like the African negotiator group, need a lot more support, whether that's in access to information, access to these spaces, there's more opportunities to interact with these countries in a way that they are not given in any context. So those are the two things I would change.

Simon Chin-Yee 35:18
Look the UNFCCC process is based around this concept of consensus, this is part of the problem, right? It means a race to a bottom. It means that we can that Saudi Arabia can say one thing, and every country has to agree with it, because it's based around that. Now, on the positive side, consensus is often used in different un spaces as a means of working together in collaboration to between countries. But what we saw in Baku was it's just too slow. It's like, you want to raise ambition, okay, we can raise ambition, but we need to ramp it up in such an incredible way. This is the process is just too laborious. It's too it takes too long. It's clearly, we've been doing it for 29 years.

Mark Maslin 36:00
Well my take home is that we should have cops in locations which are positive. Want to actually have real agreements with climate change. We also need presidents and hosts to really understand international negotiations. This was the difference. You could see when the French took over and they did the Paris Agreement, they knew how to actually get 196 countries to agree to something in Glasgow, we got almost everything agreed because we knew how to actually engage with those and that's the key. We need these conferences to be in places where the hosts and the country actually understand and respect 196 countries and can actually get these high ambition agreements agreed on the day.

Simon Chin-Yee 36:56
But I think we have to be careful there as well, because they also have to be equitably divided amongst the five regions of the world. And I The point is well taken. Look what's just happened. But at the same time, we need, even if they're seen as bad players or maybe not good faith players, they're part of they're part of the geopolitics of the world. They're part of the economy. If we can get a country that's 90% reliant on fossil fuels to start looking at decarbonizing and and working with the port of Baku, you can see how they want to use green energies in their in their in the Caspian Sea. That's that's a positive moving forward. We need them to be part of the conversation.

Professor Priti Parikh 37:35
I guess the challenge is that I think everyone wants to move in the right direction, but then it always comes down to money. I keep on coming back to money, because you need resources. So if a country is reliant on fossil fuels for 70% or 80% of their power supply, then it means there's going to be loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industry, and they will need to be there's going to be a workforce that needs to be retrained and re skilled. So for that, you need resources

Anoushka Jain 38:03
just to add I feel like COP needs to be less comfortable, because we go to GOP, and I didn't realize what this huge, kind of grand performance it was, in a lot of ways. So let's have go up in areas the world where climate change is very obvious, and let's have it in the summer in say, like India, when there's heat waves going on, or let's have it when there's floods in the Philippines, just so that people can understand that this is happening right now. It impacts real people with real lives. It isn't just happening in some faraway corner of the world where you never have to think about because that's what it's currently like. So

Mark Maslin 38:38
The take home is that we have to make cops really uncomfortable, and it reminds me that the president of the Maldives once held his whole cabinet meeting in scuba gear under the ocean, just to highlight what sea level change was going to mean for his country.

<<music>> That's it for our annual cop debrief. But by way of a palette cleanser, after all that heavy lifting, climate change talk, let us indulge ourselves in some music and a new composition commissioned by the collaboration between UCL and the BBC young composer project.

Simon Chin-Yee 39:23
Here's Sian Bateman from the BBC to explain.

Sian Bateman 39:27
So last year, we had six winners of the BBC young composer competition selected, and they're young people aged 12 to 18 from across the UK. They were given the opportunity to work with academics at UCL east and also the BBC Concert Orchestra to develop their very own pieces of music. This was inspired by Luke Jerome's guy that hangs in the atrium at UCL East Marsh gate, which is a very impressive inflatable globe. Their pieces were performed as part of the BBC Proms in the summer of this year. And their inspirations ranged from Earth's biodiversity, aided by the biome health project at. Academics to looking at Earth's beauty more holistically. We really wanted to encourage young people to reflect on how they take current issues, the climate included, and things that are affecting them today, and channel their voices into creativity. We're now going to hear an extract from a piece written by BBC young composer competition winner advaith. The piece is aptly named Gaia. It was inspired, in his own words, by a sense of awe and unity held by astronauts when Viewing Earth from space.

<<music>>

Mark Maslin 41:01
That's it for this episode of generation one from UCL, turning climate science and ideas into action. But stay tuned for the rest of the series, or listen on catch up to all our episodes on your favorite platform. If you'd like to ask a question or suggest a guest that you would like to hear on Generation One, you can email us on podcasts@ucl.ac.uk. Otherwise for more information about UCL's work in the climate space and what our staff, students and researchers are doing to make a more sustainable future, head to the UCL generation one website. Or follow us on all social media #UCLGenerationOne.