Glasgow Friends make sense of COP29
‘The clean energy transition is happening.’ Ed Miliband defends COP29.
Glasgow Quakers explored community action beyond COP29 this week.
The session ‘Making Sense of COP29’ on 2 December included a first-person report from the international two-week summit, which ended last month.
The local observer, Ben Richards, a paleoclimatologist and climate communicator, reported on his experience at the conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. In the talk, Ben Richards explained his reasons for going to the summit, which he has attended four times as an official observer, including COP26. ‘There’s often pushback about flying,’ he said, ahead of the event. ‘However, overall, I think people will find there’s a value in hearing from an observer about what actually goes on and what the sticking points and breakthroughs actually are, [and] what their significance is.’
The session was organised by Glasgow Quakers as part of their weekly climate cafe, and the social enterprise Loco Home. Carmen Lean, from Glasgow Meeting and a Loco Home community development worker, told the Friend that the gathering was to consider how to move forwards after ‘the failure’ of COP29. ‘I find the whole situation scary and urgent. The experts are saying COP is not fit for purpose, so the focus now is on community action and keeping up hope. It’s quite emotionally intense, in that we have these big global conferences failing so badly, so the session will be trying to process what to do next.’
The COP29 summit in Azerbaijan ended early last week on 24 November when negotiators agreed to triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of US$100 billion annually, to US$300 billion annually by 2035. But critics slammed them for falling short of the US$1.3 trillion developing countries had asked for, and only pledging this as a target, with money from unverified sources.
Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy security, defended the summit, saying: ‘The clean-energy transition is happening [and] unstoppable because economic prosperity and tackling the climate crisis now point in the same direction.’
