- What timeline options were delegates debating?
- How did the timeline discussions unfold?
- What were the main points of disagreement?
- Why is the IPCC in a ‘serious funding crisis’?
- How have scientists reacted?
- What other issues remain unresolved?
- How are the IPCC AR7 reports progressing?
- How might the IPCC use AI and enhance gender inclusivity?
The world was not made for human beings; human beings were made within a world already in motion. Mountains were rising, waters circulating, winds sculpting landscapes, and beings living, dying, and evolving long before anyone called them “resources” or “ecosystems.”
To remember this is to remember that humans are participants, not protagonists, in a larger, unfolding story. The “inbetween” names the field of forces, relationships, and intelligences that hold everything together and quietly teach us how to live.
The Missing Presence
In climate conversations, nearly all focus remains on human experience: our heat waves, our floods, our economies. Even when we speak of “nature,” it is often treated as an abstraction, absent, silent, reduced to numbers and reports.
Picture two people discussing ocean warming, the changing salinity, acidity, and oxygen levels. Their concerns may be sincere, their facts accurate, yet the ocean itself is nowhere to be found. No seawater in sight, no salt in the air, no tangible presence of what they are trying to defend.
What’s missing is not just an object but a relationship. Without water, they speak for the ocean rather than with it. That gap between human words and living reality is the “inbetween”: the space of copresence and reciprocity where genuine listening begins.
The InBetween as Relational Reality
The “inbetween” is the connective tissue of life, the space between beings that is never empty. It is where energy and responsibility circulate, where lessons about balance, limits, and renewal emerge. It is both a classroom and an ethical space: the testing ground for whether humans dominate the conversation or make room for morethanhuman voices.
When discussions ignore the inbetween, they collapse the world into a single human perspective. Nature becomes a backdrop, a passive object in need of representation. Yet the Earth is constantly communicating through tides, wind, migrations, decay, and regeneration. The problem is not silence; it is our failure to listen.
Water as Intelligent Presence
Consider water. Often labelled a “resource” or a line on a climate chart, water is in fact one of the planet’s most sophisticated presences. It shapes coastlines, redistributes heat, carries memory, and enlivens every ecosystem it touches.
Water:
- Holds memory in glaciers, aquifers, clouds, and rivers.
- Organizes life in complex webs that adapt to shifts in chemistry and temperature.
- Nourishes land and species with exquisite timing where its cycles remain intact.
To call water intelligent is not metaphorical flattery. It acknowledges a living system that responds, adapts, and cocreates the conditions for life — something no technology can replicate.
Talking With, Not For
Honouring the inbetween means refusing to speak for nature in its absence and learning instead to talk to it. This begins with presence, bringing the element into the space of dialogue, physically and symbolically, and engaging it with respect.
Imagine climate discussions where:
- A vessel of seawater rests at the center of the room, grounding the conversation in the reality it concerns.
- Participants take a moment of silence, touch the waterl, and consider where that water has travelled and what it has witnessed.
- Decisions are framed as questions to the water: What do you need from us? How are you already responding? How must we change to restore the right relationship?
The water does not answer in words, but through currents, chemistry, and movement. Listening becomes a relational practice of dialogue instead of a monologue.
Beyond HumanCentred Narratives
Recentring the inbetween overturns familiar climate narratives. It shifts concern from what climate change is doing to us to what Earth is asking of all beings, human and morethanhuman. It challenges the idea that the world is a stage built for human achievement and replaces it with humility, the awareness that our knowledge, while powerful, is partial.
Environmental destruction is not only a technical crisis but a relational one. When we discuss oceans, forests, and skies as abstractions, we reproduce the same separation and control that caused the damage.
Reweaving the Web of Relationship
Listening to nature’s voice through the inbetween calls for new practices of connection:
- Bringing elements such as water, soil, plants, and stones into meetings and ceremonies as honoured participants.
- Holding gatherings outdoors, where the morethanhuman world is not excluded but present.
- Practising protocols of greeting, gratitude, and consent before making decisions that affect the land.
- Learning from Indigenous teachings that treat land, waters, and elements as relatives with agency and law, not as mute resources.
In this way, the “impact of climate change” becomes a lived conversation among all beings. Human speech joins a chorus rather than dominating the soundscape.
Honouring the InBetween
Life will continue in some form with or without us, but human survival depends on restoring right relationships with the living world. The inbetween is where those relationships form, deepen, and become sacred again.
When climate dialogue makes space for the presence and voice of water, land, and other beings, it shifts from crisis management to relationship repair. We remember that we are not speaking on behalf of a silent planet, we are speaking within a living one.
In that shift from speaking for to speaking with, another kind of future becomes possible: one where humans take their rightful place inside a wider intelligence, listening to the teachers that have been here far longer than we have, and shaping choices that honour the lifegiving spaces in between.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Image Credit: Hector John Periquin, Unsplash
The post Nature’s Voice and the “InBetween” appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
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Three countries have been named by the Paris Agreement’s compliance committee for failing to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) and repeatedly snubbing offers of help with their climate plans.
After months of internal debate over whether to identify serial non-responders, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) named the three countries which have failed to engage with it over their NDCs on Friday.
It named Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and North Korea in a footnote of its annual report, adding that it decided to name them “with a view to facilitating engagement”, adding that representatives of the three nations had been invited to its meeting in early 2027 “with the purpose of identifying any challenges and constraints”.
“The Committee noted the importance of Parties engaging with the Committee in a timely manner, while noting that some delays may be due to the national capabilities and circumstances of the Parties”, the report said.
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In July, PAICC said 12 countries had ignored its repeated attempts to discuss why they had not published an NDC as required every five years under the 2015 Paris accord.
Members of the committee had been divided over whether to name them, but at a September meeting decided to do so in their annual report to the annual climate COP summit.
By the time the report was published on Friday, only Congo, Senegal and North Korea “had not communicated an NDC or submitted a [Biennial Transparency Report] and had not yet responded to any of the Committee’s notifications, despite several reminders issued by the Committee in this regard”.
Rainforest and renewable energy ambitions
The silence from Congo and Senegal is notable because the former is home to much of the Congo Basin rainforest while the latter has sought billions of dollars in climate finance to support its renewable energy ambitions.
After Brazil, Congo has more rainforest than any country in the world. This forest, and the country’s peatlands, absorb huge amounts of greenhouse gas but are fast being lost to expanding farmland, charcoal production, logging and mining.
Senegal signed a Just Energy Transition Partnership with Canada and wealthy European nations in 2023, to help it meet its renewable energy targets under the-then government of Macky Sall. It was chair of the Least Developed Countries group between January 2022 and December 2023.
Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge University, said the governments of the three countries should engage with the committee.
“Engagement costs these governments very little and the committee has shown it will listen,” he said.
“Silence leaves the committee with no basis to help, and it leaves the [governments] exposed to the narrative that they are simply disengaged,” he told Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement requirement
The 2015 Paris Agreement requires all parties to publish an NDC every five years outlining their emissions reduction targets, with each plan meant to be more ambitious than the country’s last NDC.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in February 2025. While most countries missed this deadline, all but around 30 – mostly small emitters but including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have now submitted them.
Over the year, the PAICC – which is made up of government climate officials from developed and developing countries – has been communicating with governments that have not submitted NDCs and trying to overcome barriers to them doing so.
Some nations have cited exceptional circumstances as the reason for not submitting an NDC, a process that requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC, seen by Climate Home News, said that the country’s civil war had led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
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The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement and so do not have active NDCs, nor does Taiwan, which is not a UN member state.
Rao said that because the PAICC is “facilitative and non-punitive”, naming the countries “is meant to open a door, not close one – the invited consultation is the point”.
“In recent months, governments that explained their constraints, whether capacity, finance or domestic process, have been met with follow-up and support rather than sanction, and the number of silent governments has fallen sharply,” Rao said.
The post Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs
Countries have failed – for the sixth time running – to agree on the timeline for publishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) next set of influential reports.
The IPCC’s 65th session (IPCC-65) was seen by many to be the final opportunity for countries to agree on a schedule where its seventh assessment report (AR7) would be published in time for the UN’s second “global stocktake” of climate action.
Before last week’s meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, IPCC chair Prof Sir Jim Skea had warned that releasing the reports in time for the stocktake in 2028 would depend on a timelines being agreed by the end of 2026.
But the week-long meeting descended into fraught disagreements between governments, resulting in Skea “suspending” the talks on Friday evening with no decision made.
Countries were also unable to agree on the IPCC’s budget for the rest of the AR7 cycle, leaving the body with a “serious funding crisis”.
The IPCC has pledged to reconvene the meeting at the “earliest opportunity”; however, it has not yet given an indication of when this will be.
In his concluding remarks, Skea described the Addis Ababa summit as a “profound disappointment” and “among the most difficult IPCC meetings”, according to reporting from the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Some countries have reacted with dismay to the breakdown of negotiations, warning that a failure to have the IPCC’s latest assessments on climate adaptation and mitigation ready for the UN stocktaking exercise would undermine glob