- 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?
I gingerly held the blue glass ball in my palm, noticing the point where sunlight cast a tiny blue-tinted shadow on my skin.
A minute ago, while visiting my sister at work, I was telling my sister’s boss about my interest in learning about other countries. Her boss seemed energized by me, a high school junior, and the way I expressed my passions. She reached into her desk and brought out a rattling tupperware full of marbles. Wordlessly, she opened it, selected one, and placed it in my hand.
“This blue marble is for you,” she said.
“Thanks,” I replied, a little puzzled.
“You clearly care about the world. Keep this marble as a symbol of your commitment to making our world a better place.”
The marble stowed safely in my pocket, I turned to walk out. Before I could, she handed me the whole tupperware, telling me to “pass them along.” I took those marbles home with me, and they sat in my bedroom for a long time.
I went off to college and embarked on a pathway to become a high school English teacher. Throughout those early adulthood years, I maintained my global perspective and became increasingly aware that climate change is one of our world’s greatest challenges. I reflected on my carbon footprint, took environmental studies courses, and read widely on climate-related topics ranging from agriculture to paleontology. I had always loved hiking, but developed a bittersweet fondness for the ecosystems I walked through, knowing what was at stake in the climate crisis.
As I learned more, I began to wonder how I could make a bigger impact.
After graduating from college, I began experiencing my first feelings of climate anxiety. Red skies, hazy horizons, and yellow grass in a Minnesota summer felt apocalyptic. I was used to droughts and wildfires from growing up in California, but I never thought I’d experience them in the Midwest. Climate change became both a scary reality and a call to action. The English education master’s degree classes I was taking at the time felt unrelated, at times pointless. I wondered if I should have become a science teacher or gone into climate non-governmental organization (NGO) work instead. Teaching reading and writing felt empowering, but unconnected to my anxiety-fueled passion for climate.
In the last month of my master’s program, I finally found a connection. I was taking a class called “Adolescent Literature, Youth Activism, and Climate Change Literacy.” In it, we read young adult novels and learned about the power of teaching climate awareness through fictional stories. A fellow student teacher and I were assigned to design a two-week unit for our 11th graders to wrap up the school year. We decided to apply what we’d learned in our climate literacy class. Everything clicked.
We taught a unit centered on climate change texts — documentaries, picture books, poems, social media posts, and more. My 11th graders asked thoughtful questions; their eyes grew wide with realizations; they led their own class discussion. As majority students of color, they were energized by the intersection of social justice and climate change. In short, they leaned in. It was the most engaged I’d felt as a teacher all year.
On the last day of school, I fished a tupperware of blue marbles out of my desk. Holding one up to the light, I told my blue marble story, then gave one marble to each student. Soon, the room was filled with clinking, tapping, and the occasional giggle as a few marbles rolled under desks.
“This is your blue marble,” I told them. “Hold it gently and don’t lose it. Let it represent one thing you can do to help our planet, our blue marble.”
Students filed out of the class and into their summer vacations, voicing commitments to buy less, drive less, and eat less meat. As I listened to them, I worried my lesson on the importance of collective action hadn’t fully sunk in. Would students forget that it’ll take more to address climate change than bringing reusable shopping bags? But I wasn’t discouraged. These were 11th graders, and this was a start.
Since then, I’ve doubled down on my passion for climate literacy. I’m now a fully-fledged teacher with my own classroom and four sections of 9th grade English. I’ve joined several climate education organizations, including The Center for Climate Literacy, founded by the University of Minnesota professor who taught the class that started it all.
This September, a former student visited my classroom. We reminisced about her 9th grade experience and I wished her luck. She walked towards the door, but just before leaving, she turned back.
“I still have my blue marble, by the way,” she said. “It’s on my dresser, so I see it every morning as I get ready for the day.”
This is why I’m a teacher.
Abby Hartzell is a Language and Literature and Leadership teacher at a Fridley High School, an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School located in Fridley, MN. She is passionate about teaching climate literacy through stories to empower youth with knowledge of climate change, climate justice, and creative solutions. She has participated in climate educator fellowships through the University of Minnesota Center for Climate Literacy and The Climate Initiative. In the classroom, Abby shares her love of community building, lively discussion, reading, and music with her students. Outside of the classroom, Abby enjoys baking, hiking, bicycling, and listening to audiobooks on neighborhood walks.
Abby is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP28. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
The post This Blue Marble is for You appeared first on Climate Generation.
Continue Reading
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.
-
Under US pressure, World Bank says it will back gas “where appropriate”
The US wants the World Bank to expand its gas support while climate campaigners are pushing for it to end – its head spoke this week of limited backing for the fossil fuel -
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
After governments again failed to agree a timeline, nearly 120 IPCC authors pledged to complete their assessment on time and with full scientific rigour -
Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
Many governments have still not submitted a nationally determined contribution to the UN, breaching a key requirement of the Paris Agreement
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.
-
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
After governments again failed to agree a timeline, nearly 120 IPCC authors pledged to complete their assessment on time and with full scientific rigour -
Under US pressure, World Bank says it will back gas “where appropriate”
The US wants the World Bank to expand its gas support while climate campaigners are pushing for it to end – its head spoke this week of limited backing for the fossil fuel -
Who shapes climate science? The equity question facing the IPCC
Early completion of the next global climate science assessment reports risks excluding research from the Global South, which is key to ensuring the findings are fair
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 global climate action.
A climate envoy from a Pacific island state said it was a “travesty that a handful of countries continue to delay the IPCC’s reports – the science we need back home to help us save lives and livelihoods”.
Below, Carbon Brief explores the key developments, debates and disagreements at the IPCC meeting.
- 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?
What timeline options were delegates debating?
Top of the agenda during the Addis Ababa meeting was a decision on the timeline of the publication of AR7’s three working group reports – also known as the “work plan”. The three reports cover climate science (WG1), impacts and adaptation (WG2) and mitigation (WG3).
Countries failed to reach a resolution on the scheduling of the influential reports at five consecutive IPCC meetings since 2024 – despite drafting being well underway.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s write-up of discussions in Istanbul, Sofia, Hangzhou, Lima and