At COP 26 & 27 (Glasgow & Sharm El-Sheikh) I spent some time at the Cryosphere Pavilion, which is administered and run by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI). The same team also compiles the annual State of the Cryosphere report and releases it just before COP. In Spring of 2023 they asked me to serve as an expert reviewer for the report, in part because Antarctic sea ice was going to feature prominently in it for the first time. After reviewing the report, I suggested that I give a talk at the pavilion about my experiences in the field during the record conditions that led up to COP. I also volunteered to be on hand generally to press home the seriousness of the situation to visitors and speakers with first hand experience. Happily the ICCI agreed, and paid for my flights and accommodation for the first week of the conference.
Discussing the threat of sea level rise with the environment minister of Chile.
Showing up in Dubai was a climate and culture shock! I’d just spent eight months in relative isolation at Rothera research station, so it was a strange feeling swapping my parka for a suit jacket, packing into the city’s metro like a sardine, and dodging the 30 degree desert heat. Despite being the biggest COP ever, my badge collection was nearly seamless; I feel asleep from jetlag on the metro to the venue and had to be woken up by another conference delegate at the right stop. The ICCI invites a team of early career researchers every year to help run the pavilion, and it was a real pleasure to meet them and I was impressed and slightly intimidated (as always) by its quality. Being my third COP, it was also great to catch up with the cluster of senior scientists who are becoming permanent fixtures of the pavilion and the event more broadly.
I think its fair to say that hopes were generally low for COP 28, at least in terms of global climate action. The presidency (held by Dubai) had been making some very positive noises before the conference, and straight out of the gate made a surprise announcement on operationalising a loss and damage fund that was received positively. But almost straight afterwards the president sparked outrage by saying that there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C. He elaborated by saying that development without the fuels wasn’t possible "if you don't want to catapult the world into the Stone Age". This undoubtedly had a serious effect on morale inside the venue.
While hopes were low in general, I had high hopes for the cryosphere’s emerging prominence in the debate. The ICCI is much more than a media-facing organisation, and last year its political efforts were rewarded with an explicit acknowledgement of “the cryosphere” in COP 27’s influential cover letter. In Sharm El-Sheikh it had also convened a coalition of countries under the banner of “Ambition on Melting Ice” (AMI). It seems like James Kirkham in particular did quite a lot of hand-shaking and button-holing in the year afterwards, and the coalition didn’t just survive to the next COP, but returned to COP 28 with the motivation to actually influence the negotiators and negotiations.
The UNFCCC already has quite a lot of blocs and coalitions, so it’s sensible to ask why it needs this new one. From my perspective AMI is worth having because cryospheric change (read: melting ice) cuts across the spectrum of culture, economic development and geographic location. For instance, the melting of mountain glaciers draws together countries like Switzerland (World 3rd GDP per capita in 2021) and Nepal (161st). Sea level rise from melting ice sheets like Greenland and West Antarctica impacts the East Coast of the USA (~8mm per year) and Bangladesh (~4 mm per year). So the cryosphere is potent and uniting lens through which to present shared vulnerability, but also shared ambition for global climate action.
Inaugural meeting of Ambition on Melting Ice at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh
As usual, the ICCI organised a number of invited talks and themed sessions. The unexpected highlight of these for me was by Tzeporah Berman from the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. I have a bit of background with environmental campaign groups, so have seen a lot of impassioned speeches about the critical importance of environmental change; but this one really stood out. You can rewatch it on youtube here. Incidentally, I ended up at the FFNPT mid-conference party shortly before I left, which was (again, perhaps unexpectedly?) incredibly good, not just for the cocktails and sea-views but also for climate-celeb spotting. Not that I encourage that sort of thing.
The ICCI also did some direct campaigning during the conference, with a media push on sea level rise leading up to a protest-style action on the middle weekend. The messaging was based on projections from Climate Central’s coastal flood risk maps. The action saw scientists and policy experts come together along a line in a part of the conference venue that would theoretically be flooded by the IPCC’s low-likelihood, high-impact sea level rise scenario. I helped out with the media campaign in the run-up, taking photos (with Irene Quaile and Susanna Hancock) at famous Dubai venues that would be flooded by different amounts of sea level rise.
ICCI organised a half-way demonstration on sea level rise - Photograph by Irene Quaile.
So was COP 28 a success? That’s too broad of a question to be helpful; it was certainly a success for some, and a failure for others. And is a success measured relative to what we needed, or what we expected? The meeting had a special significance as the conclusion of the first “global stocktake”. It seems to me that this process was a failure, in that it didn’t catalyse any extra ambition or action. The line from the presidency (repeated by others) was that the closing agreement signalled “the beginning of the end for the fossil fuel era”, which is obviously not enough in the views of those I’ve spoken to. Perhaps more tellingly, the language around 1.5 seemed to shift from “keeping it alive” to “keeping it within reach”. This was widely seen as a nod to the possibility for direct air capture of CO2 after an overshoot. The capacity this technology is generally deemed by experts to be greatly over-hyped.
There also seems to be a growing consensus that the UNFCCC framework (of which COPs are a big part) was well conceived to get the Paris Agreement signed (ambition), but does not function well for implementation (the phase we’re now in). This is to a degree unavoidable, but there also has not been a lot of innovation in the UNFCCC. Furthermore, it appears that delegates are increasingly gaming certain processes within the framework; this year was the first time where the following year’s venue (and therefore presidency) was significantly politicised.
Another reason for the disconnect between COPs purpose and its ability is that meetings are now far too big. At Glasgow there were 40,000 attendees, in Sharm el-Sheikh it was 50,000, in Dubai there were in excess of 90,000. Even considering the reality that some people only attend for one day of the two-week event, and many are not “blue-zone accredited”, this is obviously somewhat ridiculous. While some have attributed this excess to an expansion in the NGO sector (14,000 this year; I am one of these!), the bloat is pretty much across the board. 50,000 delegates were associated with national parties or party-overflow this year. As pointed out by Alix Dietzel and Katharina Richter from the University of Bristol (from whom I also took these numbers), party-overflow badges are a major enabler of the massive fossil-fuel lobbying operation which really hampers progress.
While COP28 was probably a large-scale failure (at least in my view), it seemed to be another success for the ICCI and “the cryosphere”. The Ambition on Melting Ice seems to be gathering pace and influence, and there is a growing sense that the cryosphere is a major differentiator between 1.5C and 2C worlds; on this basis its salience in negotiations is growing.