Post COP29 Reflections: Order and Progress?
In college, I had a lanky, tall friend who would gleefully pronounce that “Entropy is increasing.” With a silly grin, he would demand that we must all immediately repent for our sins. He was referring, of course, to the second law of thermodynamics, which declares that disorder and randomness inevitably increase over time in closed systems. He later earned a doctorate in physics, and since we lost touch decades ago, I don’t know if he himself ever repented (or what that might even mean?). But I suspect that if he still reads the news, he would declare that global disorder is clearly increasing. He might even feel less silly.
Disorder and fragmentation were clear messages from a wide variety of news sources about Azerbaijan’s COP29. These journalists weren’t necessarily wrong (and the UNFCCC is not a closed thermodynamic system), but I am also not sure that the level of disorder in global climate policy actually requires moral absolution quite yet. If you were to judge only by the reports in major media and even most climate-focused news sources, you might assume that climate policy is in rapid retreat. Headlines have referred to several significant trends: the potential withdrawal of several signatories from the Paris Agreement or even the whole of the UNFCCC itself, the lack of consensus about how much concessional finance is necessary for emerging economies, and the hesitation around commitments to decarbonize economies, to name a few.
Instead, I would argue that these trends reflect a new order rather than disorder. And that the new order shows the increasing power and stridency of voices that have been absent from climate policy until now. We can no longer separate tensions over the speed of climate mitigation efforts from how we see political relationships and tensions in the Middle East or the East China Sea. The war in Ukraine is largely the reason that COP29 took place in Azerbaijan rather than other countries in eastern Europe, while petrostates are involved as COP hosts because climate policy is now a major influence on their economic strategy. The domestic politics of in Europe, North America, and the Indo-Pacific are now pervasively expressed through climate and aid policy.
But disruptive tensions today can bend and twist rapidly, flexing between centrifugal and centripetal forces, shifting in surprising directions. Just as a blue note in jazz and blues demands tonal resolution, geopolitical and domestic economic and political forces outside of climate policy can also decrease climate entropy and promote convergence. The positive trends within the COP seem to have mostly been ignored in the reporting I’ve seen. Here, I want to sing in praise of harmony.
For instance, compared to Dubai’s COP28, where the non-diplomatic public “green zone” was crowded and busy, full of companies and sectors and trade groups burnishing their climate cred, the green zone was mostly empty in Baku.
At first, I thought this was because the COP was so much smaller. But COP29 was by any historical standard a pretty large event, with some 50,000 attendees. That’s bigger than all but one or two previous COPs. Unlike in UAE, however, almost all of those attendees were in the “blue” diplomatic zone. Those hallways and paths were crowded and full of intense conversation. And the presence of businesses in the negotiating space was important: I think many of them were there because they are trying to buy into climate policy.
Why? I think the short answer is that they now understand that climate policy is becoming economic policy. And they see climate risk as a major driver in how and where they should work. They need climate policy to work, because they can’t just pick their businesses up and move to some climate-neutral space.
At dinner one evening with a diverse group, a new colleague from a major European water services firm declared, “My biggest problem is how to link my local projects to NDCs and NAPs.” That may have been the nerdiest climate statement I have ever heard from a businessperson — and one that thrilled my own nerdy, entropy-ridden heart.
He was signaling that climate adaptation and mitigation policy — especially those pieces that related to water — matter to the bottom line of day-to-day operations for large parts of our economies. He wanted to invest in the living, breathing climate priorities that governments are now drafting in preparation for COP30 in Brazil next year. Entropy is definitely not decreasing at COP if businesses are beginning to engage at this level. Companies bring the gravitas of jobs, investment, and growth.
They are also not a universal positive. In one very well funded southeast Asian pavilion, I listened to a prominent representative of what is emerging as an important global adaptation consulting firm describe “insights” into adaptation that seemed to come from a time capsule ten or fifteen years ago. I was struck how the economic status of a messenger might also delay or defer (or distract from) effective work.
I just now happen to be on a month-long continuous travel jaunt across three continents and six countries that only started a month ago in Baku. Last week I happened to be in Brasilia, chatting with two ministries and a development bank about what good adaptation and resilience policy and implementation sound like in Brazilian Portuguese. Key insights from our meeting included the strategic role of water resilience in national climate planning, which is transitioning to state governments and their planning processes as well as to cities. From their perspective, businesses are both an essential and a largely untapped source of partners. What I heard is that Brazil needs not just a whole-of-government engagement to climate policy but a whole-of-economy approach.
These are not the climate stories that I am reading in The Guardian or the New York Times. But they are important stories, and ones that show the creeping, seeping influence of climate policy far beyond the confines of the COP headlines.
I remain an optimist, unready to repent. Entropy may be decreasing!
John Matthews
Washington, DC, USA