Peter Betts (seated, pink shirt) at COP17 in Durban, South Africa, in 2011
IISD/ENB Leila Mead
The Local weather Diplomat
Peter Betts, Profile Editions
Local weather negotiators, lobbyists and world leaders will descend on the Brazilian rainforest metropolis of Belém subsequent month for this 12 months’s UN local weather summit, COP30.
For anybody who has been to a COP summit, or tried to observe one from afar, the conferences can really feel fully bewildering. Dozens of parallel negotiating tracks happen on the similar time, replete with cryptic agendas and buzzword-y labels, starting from “dialogues” and “consultations” to “casual casual” discussions.
To an observer, it will probably really feel like an enormous speaking store, wrapped up in its personal conventions and with little relevance to the surface world. Fortunately, we’ve the knowledge of Peter Betts, a legendary determine in COP circles, to set us straight.
Outsiders are unlikely to have heard of Betts. However as the previous lead local weather negotiator for the UK and the EU, he performed a central position in laying the groundwork for the Paris Settlement and in steering negotiations that obtained it over the road in 2015.
Betts sadly died of a mind tumour in October 2023, and his e-book, The Local weather Diplomat: A private historical past of the COP conferences, was printed posthumously this August. It gives an insider’s account of what goes on at local weather summits and takes us by way of their fashionable historical past, starting when Betts took cost of UK worldwide local weather coverage in 1998.
The very first thing to turn out to be clear is that, though COPs are sometimes held in far-flung areas, from Peru to Paris, Durban to Dubai, the lifetime of a local weather negotiator is hardly glamorous. Nationwide groups spend years strategising and planning their negotiating ways for the annual two-week summits, solely to spend the whole fortnight locked in windowless short-term buildings as they thrash out the high quality particulars.
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Amid the chaos, negotiators should discover a method to deliver everybody to the desk and attain consensus
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At COP17 in Durban, South Africa, Betts remembers how delegation places of work have been sited underground in a carpark that “reeked of petrol and diesel fumes”, whereas at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the meals “consisted virtually completely of enormous round rolls full of a brown paste”. Clearly, local weather diplomats aren’t in it for the jet-setting way of life; they really consider that is one of the best ways to resolve the local weather disaster.
Slowly, over the course of the e-book, it turns into clear why, as Betts takes us on a crash course on how a COP summit works, together with the foundations governing conferences and the negotiating positions and aims of various nations.
The sheer vary of points is mind-boggling: some nations deal with securing extra monetary assist for growth, others need nations to step up and decide to bold cuts to greenhouse fuel emissions, whereas some are merely there to hinder progress and keep the established order. Every nation can also be hamstrung by its personal home politics, monetary place and cultural outlook.
Amid the chaos, negotiators should discover a method to deliver everybody to the desk and attain consensus – unanimous, no much less – on the following steps to resolve local weather change. To name this a tall order is certainly a colossal understatement.
Betts writes with readability and an usually acerbic wit, even when there are some dense sections on, say, the intricacies of multilateral local weather finance. However, steadily, you begin to perceive how the COP sausage is made, and the way the strands align to construct a finely balanced agenda within the hope of bringing nations collectively underneath a standard objective.
The place issues actually come alive is once we are taken behind the scenes of the key summits – Copenhagen, Paris, Glasgow – and given the within observe on how issues unfolded. We hear of prime ministers and presidents “robotically consuming biscuits” in crunch conferences, stealing the present with unplanned, “damaging” press conferences, hiding within the VIP areas from their groups and “exploding” with anger when issues don’t go their approach.
There’s additionally greater than sufficient gossip about Whitehall movers and shakers to maintain British politicos engaged, and a few perceptive insights into how local weather campaigners have fallen brief – and typically even broken progress on emissions discount – with their lobbying methods.
There are many individuals who dismiss the position of those summits in driving international local weather motion, arguing that they’re little greater than a tortuous gab fest. However the proof reveals in any other case: earlier than the Paris Settlement was struck in 2015, the world was on track for five°C of warming by the tip of the century. A decade later, that trajectory has fallen to about 2.7°C – nonetheless far too excessive, however a great distance from the actually catastrophic destiny we have been headed in direction of.
Diplomacy can change the world. On this e-book, Betts offers an unparalleled perception into precisely how this variation can occur.
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