Finding the Heart of COP29

When despair for the world grows in me

And I awake at night to the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake 

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds…

Wendell Berry

For most of my adult life I have wrestled with what I can do in the face of a climate and environmental crisis that casts a dark shadow over my future and the future of my young children. I have always taken to heart Wendell Berry’s wisdom of dealing with despair by going to the places where I can rest in the peace of wild things. That has meant retreats to woods and water, learning to grow food from the soil outside my back door, and trying to learn from the wild things in this place where I come from. But I also know that the scale of the problem requires something bigger, action taken at a grand scale by governments, countries, and the world as a whole. So when the opportunity arose to attend COP29, the United Nations Climate Change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, I was curious. Yet it also felt a bit out of character. 

Baku is a city of 2.5 million people, halfway around the world from my home in Michigan. What would my knowledge of tree names in the Midwest bring to this global gathering of professional negotiators from 198 countries? What did I know about global politics, or the formalities of United Nations policy making? What’s more, this COP was being called “the finance COP,” another issue that doesn’t often make its way into the woods, and which I therefore know very little about. Would this experience leave me with relief or with greater despair? 

The climate crisis has been called a wicked problem—that is, a complex problem that is hard to define and where solutions often contradict each other. The problem is so big and complicated that even individuals who are deeply concerned don’t feel like they have any part in a solution. Solutions need to happen at a grand scale, far beyond any individual action I can take. COP29 offered me a way to witness that high-level solution making and to see where individual actions might fit in. 

Before I get too far, I need to explain a few things: “COP’ stands for “Conference of the Parties.” In 1992, a treaty was signed at what is popularly known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro. Just two years before, the International Panel on Climate Change released its first report predicting a rise in global temperatures and sea levels. As a response, the 1992 treaty set up a new process with the goal of limiting the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The process was called The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was signed by 154 nations, or parties. The parties have met annually (except for 2020) since 1995 in a Conference of the Parties, or COP. The number of parties (participating countries) has since grown to 198. Past COP conferences have produced agreements which may be familiar: the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which was replaced by the Paris Agreement in 2015. 

In that 1992 document, several important things were recognized in addition to the fact that greenhouse gas emissions were adversely affecting the planet and humankind. It recognized that this problem was caused by humans and that developed countries had contributed the largest share of greenhouse emissions. Much of the work over the past 28 COPs has focused on how to slow greenhouse emissions (mitigation), how to adapt to changing conditions (adaptation), and how to fund this work, especially for developing countries. 

I had the chance to attend COP29 in Baku with a group called the Christian Climate Observers Program (aptly abbreviated CCOP). CCOP partners with dozens of organizations who are accredited with the U.N., pools the available observer badges, and invites emerging leaders and climate activists from around the world to come to COP. The group shares lodging and begins each morning with conversations and devotions to help prepare for a day inside the Blue Zone, the U.N. managed zone behind security, where the negotiations happen.  

It turns out Baku is not an easy place to get to. After traveling for 54 hours with little sleep, I arrived a few hours after midnight and found my way to the first night’s lodging. After a few hours of rest, a group of us made our way to the COP Conference grounds to get our observers’ badges. While much of the work at a COP is done by party delegates, the U.N. also welcomes observers and members of the press into the Blue Zone. COP29, while not the largest COP, had just under 11,000 people registered as observers from non-governmental organizations. These are people who have come, like me, to watch, to learn, and sometimes also to speak. 

The main agenda (and the reason this year’s conference has been dubbed “the finance COP”), was to work out a way to fund developing countries in their transition away from fossil fuels and as they adapt to changing climate conditions. Even though developed countries contribute the most greenhouse gasses, developing countries disproportionately bear the brunt of the adverse effects of climate change. In the lead up to COP29, estimates were made that it would take $1.3 trillion to meet climate change mitigation and adaptation goals. That may sound like a lot, but it’s not an unprecedented amount of money to spend on a major problem. For example, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported that global military spending was $2.2 trillion in 2023. Here’s another example: the U.S. government made $4.6 trillion available to respond and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Though some meetings are closed, many of the COP negotiations are open to observers. We watched several sessions where delegates took turns giving feedback on drafts of different statements. These sessions can be very technical and tedious, with long arguments over specific words and procedures. A COP works through consensus and the goal is to produce a final document that all 198 parties will agree to. There isn’t always a straight path to consensus and there are often several compromises at the end with backroom deals that observers only hear rumors of. 

Slow and tedious processes, while frustrating to observe, are usually more effective. A quick process—which climate advocates hope for—typically doesn’t produce solutions that will work for everyone. It became clear pretty quickly that there were some serious flaws in the process for this COP and that ambitious new goals to combat climate change were going to be unlikely.

In the end, the parties did come to an agreement, setting a goal of $300 billion for climate change mitigation and adaptation by the year 2035. This goal was a great disappointment to many of the developing countries, who felt unheard, and who had some scathing critiques of the process. There was much talk about the United States’ role in this year’s negotiations and many believe the incoming administration’s previous decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement may have prevented the parties from setting loftier goals this year. There were several additional details in the final agreement, which will be put into place or picked up again in a year at COP30 in Brazil. 

While the negotiations were going on, many of them out of public view, I not only followed as best I could, but also heard stories from around the world, attended panel discussions, and simply reflected on the beautiful diversity of the people who gathered. The stories and the people were the heart of COP29. Allow me to share a few of them.

Jocabed comes from the Gunadule indigenous people of Panama. The Guna inhabit small islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama, many of which are threatened by sea level rise. Jocabed described how people forced to move due to flooding face more than geographical displacement. Their culture has a close relationship with the sea, and moving to the mainland takes away a deep part of their identity. Sea level rise is only one of the climate effects, she also spoke about the effect on agriculture: “For my people, poverty does not mean when you don’t have money…poverty for us is when you don’t know how to cultivate the land. And for us, poverty is when we cannot read the cycle of the air or land.” 

As the climate becomes more unpredictable, it becomes harder to incorporate indigenous knowledge built over centuries. Jocabed is also a Christian who came to COP29 not only to share the importance of heeding indigenous wisdom, but also to call Christians toward the work of advocacy: “I believe the Christian people, we have to respond, and we have to advocate in this place, at a COP, to raise our voices as people who believe in the creation and in the Creator, and to maintain and to understand what shalom means, what justice means, what it means to live an abundant life.”

Litara is Samoan and is also a Christian. Many low-lying islands in the Pacific are threatened by sea level rise and predictions are that whole civilizations will need to be relocated in the next 50 years. Samoa is a larger land mass than some of the neighboring islands, and so while sea level rise is still a threat, it is not as immediate as other threats they face: cyclones, coral bleaching, and the unpredictability of seasons. Litara told stories of people and communities who, after being hit with a cyclone, recovered only to get hit by another cyclone, and then another. And like the Guna people, relocation is much more than simply a change of location. “When our oceans and our lands are impacted by climate change, it does not just affect where we live. It affects everything about us. So when big parties talk about, “oh yeah, they can just move,” and we hear this whole idea of climate change refugees—for us, it’s not just being removed, it’s literally removing our souls out of us.”

Dorcas is a climate activist from Kenya, who is also motivated by her Christian faith toward activism. Like so many other places in the world, Kenya is struggling with unpredictable weather patterns. Dorcas has seen specific effects on agriculture. Speaking of maize, a main crop in Kenya, she said, “They don’t even mature. They just start to grow a little bit. Because of a lack of rain, they turn from green to yellow and then nothing happens. So we just have to pluck them and give them to the livestock. Then, when you look at the cows, you can even count their bones.”

Jocabed, Litara, and Dorcas gave moving accounts of the struggles of climate change in their communities. These stories can be hard to hear. They can lead to the feelings of despair which wake Wendell Berry up at night. But these three women, and so many others I met and talked to, traveled from their homes to Baku to bring their message to the world. Their travel and their voices are a sign of their hope.

Dorcas told me, “You don’t have to start big and loud. You can start small where you are, and it doesn’t matter how small an action is, because they matter to bring climate justice. Start and do what you can do. Start from where you are.”

These stories helped me to put names and faces to the more abstract and technical language of the negotiation rooms. This gave a reality to the stakes of climate finance. These are people facing a disruption to their world, a disruption which they contributed very little to.

Having come back home to my small garden plots browned by early winter, I have tried to decide what this all means. Because the final agreement at COP29 was a far cry from what is needed to help the most vulnerable, and because those who will suffer the most are those who have contributed the least to the problem, friends and family have asked if the trip left me dispirited. That answer is complicated. I came to COP29 with a fair bit of skepticism that it would be the answer to the problem of climate change. I did not have a lot of trust that this moment in global politics would lead us down the path to a sustainable future. In the end, I was not convinced that this COP or any future COP will save us. And yet I have come home with at least as much hope as I left with, and with a great deal more inspiration. The people I met have not given up, even in the face of suffering that has not made it to my part of the world. I hope their stories, their perseverance, their grit, their faith, and their love will seep into the negotiating rooms, into COP30 and beyond, and into the minds of those in developed countries. 

The United Nations, or any particular government, may not come through with ambitious climate change plans at the speed we need them. But around the world there are young people, indigenous people, people who have not always been given seats at the negotiating table, who are doing the work that needs to be done. I choose to put my trust in them, and then join them, doing small things, speaking with conviction, and urging our world toward a brighter future.