While the two-week COP 29, the United Nations climate summit, ramped up in Baku, Azerbaijan, Super Typhoon Pepito pummeled the Philippines’ Visayas and Luzon islands — the sixth of a series of strong typhoons that entered the country in just a span of one month — leaving trails of lost lives, livelihoods, and damaged properties. The typhoons’ message was clearer than the often lukewarm commitment of world leaders: the climate crisis is worsening.
The Conference of Parties (COP) is an annual gathering of states signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which became the basis of landmark global agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015 aiming to limit global warming. This year’s COP is dubbed as a “finance COP” as its focus will be on how to ensure finance for poor countries to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, attempting to make progress on raising to USD 1 trillion per year for the climate finance of the world’s most vulnerable countries.
However, this year’s COP is beset with controversies. First, the choice of another petrostate host country Azerbaijan is criticized as a gaping irony and an attempt at greenwashing. Second, leaders of major economies skip the COP. Delegates from Argentina pulled out amid the summit; its far-right president earlier called the climate crisis a socialist lie. On the other hand, there are uncertainties that the return of a Donald Trump administration will cause the United States, the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, to leave the Paris Agreement. Papua New Guinea boycotted the COP calling it a waste of time frustrated over empty promises and inaction. Papua’s frustration is often the microcosm of the vulnerable countries' dilemma where their very existence is at threat despite contributing least to global emissions.
Furthermore, critics raised that fossil fuel lobbyists are hijacking the COP. More than a thousand lobbyists from the coal, oil, and gas industries were provided access in this year’s COP. In the previous year, the same lobbyists outnumbered representatives from scientific institutions, indigenous communities, and vulnerable nations. Influential climate leaders including former UNFCCC boss Christiana Figueres and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon opined that the COP summits that have achieved much in the past are no longer fit for their purpose, especially in delivering results with speed and scale, further calling a shift from negotiation to implementation.
While the developed world and top emitters may have the luxury of time debating and maneuvering, vulnerable countries such as the Philippines live daily with the debilitating effects of the climate crisis. While leaders may have the luxury of time and the platform to deny climate change as a hoax and lie in their mansions and luxury villas, our people are drowning in floods, buried in landslides, and left with no homes and livelihoods. The clock is ticking against us yet the world is at a standstill with no accountability for the polluters and no clear vision of an alternative future.
The science is clear, warmer oceans provide energy for more powerful typhoons. Our tragedy is to be an archipelago that stands in the path of the typhoon’s cradle. Yet we refuse to accept that this is our future: to be trapped in an endless loop of devastation after devastation, recovery after previous recovery. We are no Sisyphus’ and his eternal push. We refuse to be reduced to mere statistics or another fringe history lesson of the world’s inaction, denial, and politicking. Our future is not up for bargain nor for the major powers maneuvering. Truly, the COP is a critical multilateralism platform for climate action, but the world must take it more seriously.
All eyes on board.
