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Nature and EnvironmentMiddle Easthttps://p.dw.com/p/5PR9u
“A very good afternoon to all of you, welcome my name is Ali XX and I am (name) it is our great honor to welcome you all to the COP 31 leaders summit here an Antalya, one of Türkiye’s most beautiful cities”
This is Living Planet, I’m Kathleen Schuster.
If you follow climate summits, then you might be experiencing a bit of déjà vu this week.
The UN’s must-attend event of the year is underway and is expected to draw somewhere around 100,000 people.
So far, though the speeches that global leaders opened with have a familiar ring to them.
They’ve said things like this…
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham “The climate crisis is not a distant threat. It is upon us all now. Devastating lives and livelihoods everywhere.”
and this…
Antonio Guterres “Our first climate duty is to tell the truth, and the brutal truth is that the climate crisis is outrunning us.”
and, importantly, this…
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “We have a solemn responsibility to this and to future generations to act. This is the critical decade.”
That was UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
If that moment of déjà vu is hitting you right now, that might be because global leaders, scientists and activists come together every year around this time for the UN’s high-profile conference known as COP. Or as it’s called this year, COP 31.
Moving towards solutions to mitigate the climate crisis is foremost on these leaders’ minds…
But to twist the old adage: If the UN climate summit plants a tree in a forest but nobody’s listening, does it actually make a sound?
In other words, if the debates and decisions at this summit fail to reach people, how can they possibly make an impact with voters?
We don’t have any data on who exactly is following this summit from abroad, but it did make us wonder over at here on Living Planet whether Gen Z, one such “future generation” this summit is making policies for, is watching.
One answer we got in the lead up to the climate talks last week was this
Alana: I didn’t actually know that that’s happening next week, but now I’m aware of I’d like to follow it bit, but yeah I think it’s a big issue I should probably be following.
And she wasn’t alone in her response.
In this episode, we’ll hear from several other 20-somethings from Europe, the US and Australia about whether climate policy is on their minds. DW’s chief climate reporter Louise Osborne will also join me to discuss what’s on this year’s agenda at COP and why Gen Z as tomorrow’s climate leaders need to pay close attention. Plus, a postcard from our climate reporter Katharina Schantz who spoke with Gen Z at COP 31.
Kathleen Schuster: Louise Osborne, welcome to Living Planet.
Louise Osborne: Thank you for having me.
Kathleen: So, we’re going into this year’s edition of the UN Climate Talks COP 31 on the heels of some dramatic climate events like the forest fires across Europe this past summer, the catastrophic glacial burst in Nepal and now Super El Nino.
And at the same time, we’re also witnessing political developments that could make or break climate action in the years to come, with the far right on the rise in Europe and President Trump’s administration being handed a major rebuke from voters in the midterm elections last week.
So, given that backdrop, what is expected to dominate the agenda this year at COP 31?
Louise: So, one of the major things on the agenda this year is the UN’s news that we are going to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius as a global average temperature rise.
And so, it was just over a decade ago now that the Paris Agreement was formed and global leaders decided to try to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees.
The UN says now we will overshoot that figure. And that means that we will see much worse extreme weather events.
Those things will happen with more intensity and potentially more frequency as well.
There will also be discussion, which has already started in the last couple of years about a transition away from fossil fuels
And that is hugely important because obviously the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas is what is leading to these rising temperatures.
And so governments need to make some agreement on how and when they are going to transition away from burning fossil fuels for our energy, for our transport.
The contentious points are going to be about how quickly that can be done. Some countries are in a place where they can move on and try to transition away fairly quickly.
Other countries are very dependent on fossil fuels. So it’s a real point of contention. And yeah, we’ll see how it goes over the next weeks.
Kathleen: Right. And a big part of turning away from fossil fuels is going to be by pushing for electrification. What exactly does that mean? And do they already have a goal in mind?
Louise: So what we mean by electrification is that we would move our transport systems, for example, from petrol powered cars to electric cars. We would look at changing our heating systems so that we’re using heat pumps instead of gas boilers.
And we would look at moving away from coal powered melting furnaces to having electric driven furnaces.
So this is something that the host country Turkey has been trying to push forward.
They want countries to aim to have around 35% of overall energy being driven by electricity by 2035.
And that is something actually that will be discussed heavily at this COP. They want to make an agreement on this 35 by 35 target.
The question is whether in the final agreement they will be able to include the words clean energy to generate that power. And yeah, that is going to be a point of contention because as I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of countries that are still very economically interested and focused on fossil fuels.
Kathleen: That’ll be something interesting to watch, especially with a lot of debate right now, separate topic, data centers.
But speaking of emissions going up in that sector, it’s something that’s certainly on people’s minds.
Louise, you mentioned the Paris Agreement before, and looking at that milestone in climate policy history and where we’ve come in the last 10 years, what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone well. One thing that’s impossible to ignore are the climate protests, which have largely been driven by Gen Z, which is also the focus of this particular conversation.
So what role is Gen Z expected to play at COP31?
Louise: I mean, I’ve spoken to a few climate activists who are in Gen Z, and they have been telling me that they feel generally quite sidelined from the negotiations themselves.
The role that they have is more kind of in the activism NGO sphere at the moment. So many of there to protest and to try to call for changes to be made and to be made more quickly.
There are some that are now managing to get into the negotiations. I mean, if we look at Gen Z, it’s obviously quite a huge band from 14 to 29 year olds. So they’re just aging into the negotiations, if you like. The UN, for example, supports around 150 under 35s to take part in the negotiations themselves.
To what degree they are actually involved then, I don’t know, because obviously the negotiations happen largely behind closed doors.
But it is starting to become a role that they will be taking on into the future as they get into the positions where they are able to influence the talks more directly.
But at the moment, it is very much that they are sidelined. They are asked for their opinion, but they are not given direct access to kind of any voting or to any decision making processes directly.
Kathleen: So it sounds like this is just one more call for reform among a whole list of reforms that critics are calling for in terms of how voting takes place, in terms of who has a voice. They’ve been growing and growing over the years. Could you remind us a little bit about what the major calls of reform have been about, why COP is under such scrutiny, and the younger people that you were speaking with, are there any other changes that they want to see in particular?
Louise: I mean, when it comes to the COP itself, the process is consensus based, which basically means that all of the 197 parties have to agree on any steps that are taken forward. Obviously, that is hugely difficult because these are countries that have completely different interests than having to come to an agreement that they will all be happy or at least willing to move forward on.
And this is one of the reasons that COP has always had a process that has been quite slow and incremental.
And when I was talking to the young people, this is obviously one of the most contentious points for them because they see the world changing. You have the Gen Z from the Global South who have witnessed multiple extreme weather events in their lives.
They’ve seen friends, livelihoods, communities in their countries be devastated by some of these impacts.
And yet they see this process going so slowly to make the changes that need to be made so that temperatures would go down and so those extreme weather events are not getting worse.
And this is really difficult for them to understand and to witness that their lives are being put on the line while politicians are still trying to make these decisions to move forward and while fossil fuel emissions are still rising and temperatures are still rising.
So they want to see a process that is going to be swifter. This is something that has been called for in other avenues as well, perhaps moving away from consensus-based decision making and having a democratic majority rules type of system.
But obviously not all countries want that because the countries that are perhaps very reliant on fossil fuels economically, they want to have a different way of moving away from fossil fuels.
They want to control the process a little bit more. And so they are not willing to move from a different system that gives them a disadvantage when it comes to making these decisions.
Kathleen: Right. So we’re talking about different interest groups, different realities when it comes to climate change kind of colliding.
When you were talking about the Global South, I was so happy that you brought up that point because I think this is a big one that gets glossed over a bit when we talk about the younger generation, of course we’re talking about a huge age bracket, 14 to 29, and what someone in that age range who lives in the EU or North America is dealing with, how they might see it politically versus somebody who lives in the South Pacific on an island that might not exist in the very near future.
And when I was getting ready for this conversation, I also wanted to talk with a few young people just to get an informal sense of, you know, are people following this?
Are people who aren’t active in climate protests or working in that sector interested in this at all?
And this is one of the responses that I heard.
Alana: I haven’t been following so much, but I think I should be following a bit more about climate coverage.
Ruth: I hadn’t even heard of this coming up soon. So if it weren’t for you mentioning it, no, I wouldn’t have been following it.
Kathleen: So we just heard there a young woman from Australia named Alana who’s 27 and a young woman from Dublin who’s named Ruth and 25.
Do you find it surprising that younger people might not be following this as much as we are in the media?
Louise: I find it a little devastating as a climate reporter, but I do understand it. I mean, being outside of the bubble, of course, not everybody is going to be following a process like this, for sure.
Kathleen: So I only spoke to four people in total, and those were just two individuals, two other young women, and it was a coincidence that I only spoke with women, no offense to young men, but two others had a slightly different take.
And one was a 22-year-old college student in Ohio named Sara, who said that she’s actually been following COP for a while now, this year included.
Sara: I’m an environmental studies major, so I do try to follow anything that has to do with the climate.
Kathleen: And she said among her peers, those who are studying the same thing, it’s a mixed bag. So some people follow it, some people not so much.
And then I spoke with another young woman based in Berlin who was actually kind of a real fine research-wise because she’s German-American, so I could kind of get 2 perspectives in that conversation. And she said she used to follow it a lot. And she works for a research center that deals with environmental policy.
Veronica: Which then sometimes makes it hard to also follow it, like, outside when the workday is over because it can just become an overload.
Kathleen: Which again, I think we can relate to as journalists who work on this all the time.
Louise: Yeah.
Kathleen: At some point you need to be off the clock.
But I found other things that they had to say really interesting and I kind of wanted to compare notes with you a bit because one thing that the woman in Berlin mentioned.
Veronica: Yeah, talking about climate action and stuff…
Kathleen: Veronica…
Veronica: … is much more part of my personal life because that’s kind of like the track I’ve chosen for myself and much less.
Kathleen: Was that in Berlin, climate change hasn’t really been a topic of conversation. She feels like it’s not as trendy as it used to be. Amongst my friends, even though lots of them are very politically literate and aware and talk about many other current important issues, but I do think that climate is one of the lesser ones these days.
And that their conversations tend to be driven by something that’s happening right now.
Veronica: Right now, like acutely, this topic has sort of gone down in trendiness.
Kathleen: But even with the other individuals who didn’t have it on their radar, climate change definitely is on their radar. It’s just not the UN climate talks that are on their radar.
And so even though, like Alana had mentioned to me when she and her friends talk about things like potentially having children, climate change is something that comes up in those conversations.
Alana: I personally don’t feel a sense of doom, but I also feel that as an individual, like the small actions that I can take while they might make a difference probably can’t stack up against like big corporations that are doing things that are really harming the environment. So I think there’s…
Kathleen: Or, you know, Ruth mentioned in terms of talking about climate change, it doesn’t come up very often.
But every once in a while it does, and she’s just very struck by the fact that a lot of her peers don’t necessarily have an awareness for the positive developments that have been going on.
She considers herself an optimist and looks at things like solar panel prices and the fact that the science says there are things we can do.
Ruth: Pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will, if we accept the current situation as final and futile, then we’re ignoring the tens of millions of people who wouldn’t lose their lives if we didn’t make even marginal improvements to climate change. Like if every 10th of a degree, I think that we cool the planet down, it could save millions of people.
Kathleen: So I found that all really interesting. And you’ve been covering COP for a long time, what does this tell us about the relevance of COP for this generation specifically?
Louise: I mean, I think even if people are not paying attention to COP, I mean, that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case.
The important thing about COP is that it is happening, even if it is in the background.
And we have these negotiators and these politicians who are focused on climate change for two weeks of the year at least, many for much longer periods, obviously, and who are trying to make a decision and come up with ways that we can move forward and we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and try to reduce temperatures as well, because this is something that needs to be done.
And without having these two weeks in place, maybe, these people wouldn’t all come together.
I mean, somebody told me the other day that, this is the opportunity for them to bump into people or to make meetings with people that maybe they wouldn’t see for the rest of the year. And these negotiations are not something that just happen, kind of in organized spaces, they happen in the corridors when people bump in together and then you get these little gatherings of people, discussing something.
And that is something that you can just not organize over Teams or Zoom or whatever, and so they are really important.
And even the young people that I spoke to, who do question the relevancy of COP to a large degree, were saying that they believe that these processes do need to be there. They think that the COP is very important. Obviously, these are people who are within the climate bubble, and so they are looking at this kind of specifically. But as we talked about before, it’s the reform that they’re talking about, the accessibility for them as well.
I mean, if you think that many of these people are young people who can’t afford then necessarily to travel to all corners of the world to go to these meetings and yet still want to have a voice, and I think that it’s important that maybe these meetings are made more inclusive, and particularly for people coming from the Global South where money might be a bigger issue and who really need to get the message across about what is happening as a result of these rising temperatures.
Kathleen: That’s interesting that you bring that up because it made me think of something that Sara, who we just heard from, who’s majoring in environmental studies, mentioned, which was that in her opinion, the interest in these kind of high-level talks or the lack of interest might also be tied with a general feeling among her peers.
Sara: Like especially now, it can feel like we’re not getting any government policy being ineffective right now. And that like we can’t necessarily rely on the government. So I think a lot of people are kind of focusing on private protests or personal action.
Kathleen: So what you were bringing up about the need to have a voice and be part of a process is very interesting to consider. Yeah, what effect would that have on somebody to go attend?
Louise: Just to add something there, there’s a lot spoken about with regards to the relevancy of the COP and whether the process works and is effective.
But we have to remember, before the Paris Agreement, we were looking at temperature rises of up to 3 or 4 degrees. And okay, there are still policies. By the end of the century. By the end of the century, yeah, just to put that in place.
And now that these changes have been made, obviously there are policies that still need to be put in place and governments still need to be taking action.
These temperatures are now at around 2.8 is the projection if all policies were put in place. Still too high, but a huge drop then from what it was before. So we have to have some kind of trust that, or not blind trust.
There should be some advocacy and there should be some pushing from civil society and from young people to make these processes happen.
But we have to believe that with the COP, that there is the chance that the projected temperatures will come down as a result of negotiations like these.
Kathleen: So another topic that’s come up in previous editions of COP has been finance, specifically for climate mitigation, but also helping countries that have been badly affected by extreme weather caused by global heating to receive the help they need to rebuild. What role is that expected to play this year? And also, how is finance doing in general?
Because just a few years ago, $300 billion was committed to these countries in the global South, and that was supposed to be paid out annually as of 2035. So are they making any inroads in that? And are there any plans to up that amount of money?
Louise: So finance is a huge issue. As you said, for the global South, it’s super important because their transition away from fossil fuels relies on them having enough money to do that and to still be able to build their economies.
But they are also hugely reliant on the Global North to help them make the changes they need to make to deal with the extreme weather events that they are dealing with as a result of climate change.
And so that is something that they are going to be calling for, that they call for at every COP to try and get the financing in place so that they can do that. Adaptation, for example, is severely underfunded.
The 300 billion figure that you were talking about is hugely important. As you said, that was something that they decided on a couple of years ago in Baku in Azerbaijan.
And that figure is still far away from being in place.
At the moment, I don’t have the exact figure in my head, but they have been providing just over 100 billion every year to the global South to help them in terms of climate financing. A lot of that is done in the form of loans, which is seen in some corners as being quite unfair because obviously then the countries then have to pay that money back as well. And whether they will reach the 300 billion by 2035 is questionable. They missed the figure of 100 billion, which was the earlier goal by quite a few years. It’s really kind of hard to know yet. We’ve still a little way away, obviously. And it is certainly something that will be on the agenda very strongly for those countries this year.
Kathleen: Well, you had mentioned earlier, you know, it’s a great opportunity for people to bump into somebody that they need to talk to. And unfortunately, a group of people that will not be in attendance is the US delegation. So generally in the Global North, we’ve been seeing this growing political disinterest in international cooperation in the name of saving money and prioritizing national interests. The US is a huge example of this.
During Trump’s second administration, we’ve seen USAID shut down. We’ve seen the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization, along with dozens of international organizations, including around 30 that are affiliated with the UN. And that includes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The US has also withdrawn from the Paris Agreement for the second time. So what does the US’s absence mean for other big emitters like the EU and China at these negotiations?
Louise: I mean, it’s not the first time that the US has been absent from these talks. Last year, they were already absent because President Trump did not want delegates there. And I think that there was some fear about what that would mean. I mean, the US is the second biggest emitter globally.
And there was some question about its withdrawal and what that would mean for other countries and whether other countries would also look at withdrawing. That hasn’t happened. And I think that is a really important point that other countries have stayed the course regardless of what the US is doing.
And then there was the question over climate leadership because the US did take that role to a large degree when it was still involved. But there are other countries that are really upfront. I mean, China obviously is a huge emitter. It’s the biggest emitter, in fact, producing around one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
But it is also a huge front runner when it comes to green technology. And it has moved forward in a way that no other country has. It has developed solar and electric vehicles to a point that has made them much cheaper for other economies as well and made it possible for those technologies to be rolled out. And so I think that’s really important that China has been kind of stepping up to that role. It hasn’t taken a leadership position as such.
The EU is also obviously another center for that because the EU was seen as a front runner in terms of climate policy and things. Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, that has changed to some degree with the EU struggles with energy security as a result of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine and what that has meant for the EU in terms of trying to get energy from elsewhere, LNG gas, for example, and imports of oil. And obviously, the rightward shift that has happened in some countries in the EU has also driven climate policy backwards to some degree. However, the process is still going forward. The EU is still trying to make strides and is pushing for change through the negotiations this year as it has done in many years before.
And so the loss of the US has been a big deal. I can’t say that nobody cares that the US is there. That’s not true. But they are marching forward regardless. And the US is not completely absent. There are the coalitions of mayors and cities and states like California. I mean, California is the 5th biggest emitter worldwide, if it was a country, it would be the fifth biggest mission, is what I mean. And they are taking part regardless of what President Trump is doing, and they are showing they’re willing, despite all the changes. So there is still political will to try to make the changes that need to be made, even if the US is outside of that process.
Kathleen: Okay, Louise, so I want to wrap up this conversation going back to Gen Z. And let’s hear your elevator pitch for the three good reasons that somebody between the ages of 14 and 29 needs to be following COP 31.
Louise: I think firstly, they need to be following it so that they can show solidarity with each other. As I said before, Global South Gen Z are experiencing a lot of the extreme weather events that we’ve been talking about. And I mean, so has the Gen Z in the North. They need to be standing there together to show that they believe that it’s not okay that this is happening and that they want to see change. They are the future generation and they are the ones who are going to face a lot of the impacts of climate change over the years.
Gen Z has been really great at protesting. We saw the protests with Greta Thunberg, for example, on climate change that brought millions out onto the streets. We’ve seen the recent protests over the rights that they have and the resources that are available to them. And they can only drive change if they are willing to step up and call for it. If they don’t try to make their voices heard, then changes will happen, but maybe not as quickly and not in the way that they want them to.
Kathleen: Louise Osborne is DW’s chief climate reporter. You can check out DW’s coverage of COP31 at dw.com backslash environment. Thanks so much for coming on to Living Planet.
Louise: Thank you for having me.
Before we wrap up this week’s episode, we asked DW’s climate reporter Katharina Schantz to send us a taste of what it’s like to be at the UN Climate Summit. And since we’ve devoted this entire episode to Gen Z, we also asked her to find a few teens and 20-somethings to get their take on COP31. Here’s her postcard from Turkey.
Katharina Schantz
Hi, Living Planet listeners. My name is Katharina Schantz and I’m reporting this year from COP31 in Antalya, Turkey. So it’s a sunny day. It’s a little bit humid and we’ve got 18 C and I’m walking around in a light sweater and it’s rather bright. I should have brought my sunglasses.
And I’m wearing sneakers too because it’s a lot of walking to get from A to B here. To get from one side to the other takes a good 30 minutes and it’s really busy. People rushing from place to place, many having their coffee outside and every now and then you can even hear some religious chanting in the background.
The problem is you need to get here in the first place. So there are free buses but they’re running unreliably so I took the tram and it was packed There was no space to even put my bag down and people tried to cram in at every stop. I’ve even heard of rare cases where people fainted or had a panic attack and had to exit. But if you want to find something positive in the discomfort, I made some contacts on the way because it was hard not to talk if you’re at a 20 centimeter distance from each other’s face. And of course, public transport is what a lot of young people use to come to these conferences. So there was some concern about whether civil society was able to be heard enough at the beginning of the conference.
And after I arrived, there were security checks before entering the venue where all our bags were checked and scanned, like at the airport. And afterwards, there was a long line at the goodie bags.
And the cool thing is that I’m seeing people from all over the world and I’m hearing languages I’ve never heard before. And many are dressed in suits. But every now and then you get a splash of color in traditional clothes or headscarves. And it’s super fascinating to get a snapshot of basically the entire world. in this comparatively small space. And just walking around, I’m seeing more young people than I expected, to be honest. A lot of them are volunteers helping with directions, but also from NGOs and some youth delegates. And the first thing I wanted to do when I got here was to talk to some of them and hear what they had to say.
What do you hope will be achieved at COP?
Venezuelan attendee: What I am expecting as an indigenous woman is real participation for civil society, youth and indigenous people. where sources of knowledge and our experiences are very valuable.
German attendee: I hope that we will finally make some progress on the most pressing issues as I am following adaptation. This can affect many, many areas, also my education.
Attendee from Hong Kong: To be honest, I don’t have high hopes because I read about last year’s negotiations. They may not come to consensus this year, most likely.
And if we have extreme weather events that might lead to, I don’t know, closing schools and universities, for example, so yeah, ensuring that we can get education.
Attendee from Comoro Islands: When you see here around here, you see most of the young people, they are not inside. They are unfortunately left behind. That is not normal. We have to be in front line.
Attendee from Hong Kong: Hong Kong is really hot in the summer. It’s like 40 degrees Celsius in the summer. Now there is no heat protections for elderly, for workers.
Venezuelan attendee: And also I hope people understand something important. We’re talking about adaptation. adaptation is not an option anymore. It is a reality.
German attendee: Yeah, as I am from the Global North, I’m especially privileged, so we already have access to adapt to the situation, but I would also ask my government to do so, because also in the Global North, adaptation is not a priority right now.
Attendee from Hong Kong: I think it’s still important that we try to participate in these international negotiations because we can’t really wait. It’s 1.5 degrees.
Venezuelan attendee: We are working to have a better future. We already experienced the consequences of the climate crisis and so I think we have to work to make a better world.
Katharina: That’s it from me. All the best, Katharina.
Kathleen: This episode of Living Planet was produced by me, Kathleen Schuster, and edited by Charli Shield. Special thanks to Louise Osborne and Katharina Schanz for their reporting, and to Maggie Quinlan for editorial assistance. Our sound engineer was Gian Luca Wald. You can download and listen to this and past episodes of Living Planet on all podcast platforms. And make sure to leave us a review and hit subscribe while you’re there. Thanks for listening.
