Comment: Frustration at slow progress towards the Paris Agreement goals is prompting calls to streamline the COP process – but restricting participation is the wrong response
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Lead, former Minister of Environment for Peru and COP20 President.
As we approach the latest UN climate summit, COP29, we find ourselves once more demanding faster progress, greater ambition and redoubled commitments from governments to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. We also, once more, face calls for the COP process to be reformed and participation curtailed.
These calls are partly a response to COP28, held in Dubai last year, which was attended by 83,884 people – indeed an exception. More delegates means, for example, that negotiating rooms are fuller, compromising participation for some who are deeply engaged in the process. The growing pressure to reform COPs is also partly an expression of frustration with the process and with slow advances over many years on solving the world’s most pressing environmental crisis.
Not just governments
But suggestions that COPs should become more exclusive, or less frequent, or that negotiations should be separated from civil society participation, are misguided. It is essential that the COPs continue to be transparent and inclusive, especially for Global South governments and civil society, if they are to build the broad-based support we need to transition to a net-zero world.
Each COP – or Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to give the full title – is, as the name suggests, an intergovernmental negotiation. However, the COPs have evolved over time to become much more than that, reflecting the perspectives and needs of a much wider range of stakeholders.
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An important development in that direction took place almost 10 years ago, at COP20 in Lima, where I served as COP president. There, we launched the Lima-Paris Action Agenda, to bring non-state actors – cities, business, NGOs, Indigenous communities – into the COP process. It allowed them to organise, define targets and actions, and create campaigns within the formal machinery of the COP.
This Action Agenda has given non-state actors a role – alongside the UNFCCC Secretariat and the Climate Champions appointed by COP host countries – in supporting the climate ambition of governments. It has spawned initiatives such as the Race to Zero, Race to Resilience and the Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda.
Five rings of negotiations
I see the COPs as operating in five ‘rings’ – which are concentric, influence each other, but allow different constituencies to operate and make their voices heard.
The innermost ring is the most important: the negotiations themselves. This is the forum in which decisions are made, in the context of mandates set by preceding COPs.