As Duke makes strides toward fulfilling its Climate Commitment at home in Durham, some Blue Devils are contributing to climate conversations on the international stage.
In November, a delegation of several Duke-affiliated experts, students and faculty members attended COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, to learn from scientists, policymakers and business leaders and share some of their own research insights at the world’s premier climate conference.
First held in 1995, the Conference of the Parties (COP) is an annual United Nations convention that provides a platform for governments, industries and other stakeholders to make crucial negotiations surrounding action on climate change.
According to Tyler Felgenhauer, research director of the Duke Center on Risk and a senior research scientist in the Pratt School of Engineering, COP29 “was billed as the finance COP.”
“The main item on the agenda was securing this financial package of payments from rich developed countries to poor developing countries, to increase that payment to cover for climate damages,” he said.
After years of preparation and weeks of discussion, the negotiations closed Nov. 24 with a new agreement: the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance. Delegates from developed nations pledged to contribute $300 billion annually to support climate mitigation strategies in developing countries, triple the previous commitment of $100 billion annually that was set to expire in 2025.
However, multiple Duke-affiliated attendees expressed frustration at the results of the negotiations.
“The goal that scientists say we need in order to deal with [the climate crisis] is $1.3 trillion, and that was the goal that developing countries came into the negotiations saying ‘this is what we’re aiming for,’” said Gabriela Nagle Alverio, a third-year law student and joint doctoral candidate at the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Sanford School of Public Policy who attended the COP.
The $300 billion result, then, is well under these expectations. And according to Nagle Alverio, it was a bumpy road to get even that far.
“It was a whole fight for the whole two weeks — worse than any of the other COPs I’ve seen in terms of how it dragged out and … interpersonal feelings between negotiators,” she said.
Delegates are still aiming to reach that $1.3 trillion goal by 2035, but the trillion dollars currently unspoken for are meant to come from other “public and private sources,” such as wealthy corporations and multilateral banks. But without a firm commitment, many see the goal as “an empty promise.”
Vanessa Santini Gomes, a junior who has attended previous COPs in addition to this year’s, said she came into COP29 on a “hopeful note.” However, she left feeling similar to Nagle Alverio.
“Negotiations were really slow, [and] power dynamics played such a huge role between developed countries and developing countries,” she said.
Gomes felt the political leadership of the host country, Azerbaijan, also had an impact on the efficacy of negotiations.
Azerbaijan is a major producer of oil and natural gas — fossil fuels that release large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere — and the country’s president, Iljam Aliyev, was accused of using the talks as an opportunity to promote the industry he refers to as a “gift of the God.”
“We had a pretty problematic presidency from the Azerbaijani part, and negotiations were kind of rushed at the end,” Gomes said. “This led to really poor outcomes — outcomes that underdeveloped countries, especially the most vulnerable ones, didn't want to accept but had to, because it would be bad to leave COP without a [commitment].”
Jackson Ewing, director of energy and climate policy at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, acknowledged that although “there was a pretty widespread discussion in the run-up to COP29 that the … Azerbaijan presidency would do a poor job of running the meeting logistically and that they were unprepared to host” an event with over 83,000 attendees, the conference itself was “extremely well-run.”
Still, he felt the host country fell short on the diplomacy front.
“I think diplomatically, the story is much more mixed and that the Azerbaijan presidency struggled, really, to build consensus around some of the key topics that it sought to address,” Ewing said.
Felgenhauer further expressed some surprise toward the heavy emphasis on “statesmanship” over science at the COP.
“I should not have been surprised about this, but it's not a scientific conference — it's a political conference,” he said. “… The decision’s been made to open it up to those who are interested and count as observers or stakeholders. It's probably acknowledged that most of the real work happens … before the COP, among diplomats behind closed doors … and the rest of us attending the COP are really just observers, as it says on our badge.”
However, Gomes noted the importance of diplomacy and politics in climate action, underscoring that “this is how climate [change] will be solved.”
Ewing emphasized that despite the many “justified” complaints about the seemingly slow negotiation process, the overall consistency of the annual event remains significant.
“Without the forcing mechanism of COP happening every year in that predictable fashion — even though some aspects of how it goes are fairly problematic and are functioning in a very inefficient way and are slow — I think we'd see less [accountability] … if there wasn’t a COP process,” he said. “It's important for institutions like Duke to be involved because we have a lot to offer, and we need to be offering it in forums like COP where it can be as impactful as possible.”
Outside of hosting international climate negotiations, COP also serves as an opportunity for scientists, researchers, ambassadors, students and other outside “observers” to exchange ideas and research surrounding climate issues and mitigation strategies.
This year, 15 Duke students attended as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) practicum course, which began as a student initiative over a decade ago and is now an official Bass Connections-affiliated class that prepares students each fall to attend the COP.
According to Ewing, the course’s faculty sponsor, this year’s 15 students and two graduate teaching assistants span from undergraduate to doctoral students from “a real cross-section of backgrounds and interest areas,” including engineering, business, public policy, law and the environment.
During the fall semester, students receive a “broad-based, survey-type education on climate diplomacy and on international climate policy” to prepare them to actually work with participating organizations or official country delegations while at the COP. The course delegation is split into two, with half the students attending the first week and the other half arriving for the second.
Nagle Alverio, who served as a teaching assistant for the UNFCCC course again this year, and Ashley Ward, director of the Nicholas Institute’s Heat Policy Innovation Hub who attended this year’s convention as a panelist to discuss her work with the U.N. to improve global heat resilience, both emphasized that a lot of the COP’s value lies outside the official negotiation rooms.
“There are literally people from all backgrounds who study all different things and do all different things and who have either realized that their work or studies or whatever tie directly to climate change or are impacted by climate change, and that has galvanized them to care and do something about it,” Nagle Alverio said.
Livia Hoxha, a graduate student studying international development policy at the Sanford School, shared that she happened across inspiration for her master’s thesis at COP by attending a panel on regenerative agriculture practices used by small farmers in Brazil, which she initially stopped by out of “sheer curiosity” in the country that will host COP30 next year.
“The light bulb hit in my mind. I said ‘this is my target group.’” she recalled. “So I followed the panel very passionately, I learned so much about it, and then … I plucked up my courage and decided to introduce myself to the speakers on the panel.”
Gomes, who will serve as a constituency focal point — an intermediate between the conference’s organizers and stakeholder groups — for youth non-governmental organizations at COP30 next year, expressed hope for the next conference.
“There is a pretty positive expectation for COP30 in Brazil because Brazil has been such a leader in climate diplomacy,” she said. “… However, because the outcomes were so complicated this year, it will be hard for Brazil to also continue the conversation, so we have to keep this in mind.”
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Ella Moore is a Trinity first-year and a staff reporter for the news department.