It was 8am in Baku, Azerbaijan when I woke up for the first day of COP29 still feeling the 10 hour time difference of my homelands in my bones.
The sun shone so beautifully through the kitchen window while I prepared myself some breakfast and it was the first time I really appreciated the cityscape view that I have come to love greeting every morning. I even enjoyed the gentle hum of the many parked and idling COP29 branded shuttle buses that wait outside of the hotel to bring COP29 participants to the Baku Olympic Stadium, where the event is being hosted.
After breakfast I took the elevator down to the lobby, exited the building, and hopped onto the first bus in line after showing the driver my COP29 badge. I sat down on the empty bus and then the driver began their route through the city. The bus made 2 additional stops at official COP29 transit hubs, filling the shuttle with eager COP29 participants, before heading straight for our destination.
Growing up in Minneapolis, my mother and I took the bus everywhere. We did not have access to a car until I was in middle school so taking the bus was not a choice but a necessity derived from poverty. This necessity continued through most of my 20s, as a single mother on welfare myself, while I was working towards a degree in chemistry. Now, as a financially stable adult who owns 2 vehicles and has the privilege of choice, I still tend to prefer public transit whenever possible as it is a sunk-cost in terms of carbon and VOC emissions. My point is — I am familiar with the bus and general bus etiquette.
As I sat on the bus, watching the bustle of Baku from my window seat, I was excited to feel surrounded by like-minded professionals and activists engaged in the climate change mitigation space and was looking forward to the sessions I planned to attend that day. However, I was removed from my daydreaming when I felt the pain of a hair being plucked from my head. The man sitting behind me kept putting his hands on the back of my seat with no consideration for my hair, which was simply existing. I tried shifting and moving my hair, but over the course of the bus ride his hands painfully removed at least five hairs from my head before I had had enough and switched seats.
At some point, the bus gave a slight jolt and a man near me gave a shout of frustration. He had hurt his knees on the seat in front of him when the bus jolted forwards and back again. The man mumbled under his breath and gave a long stern stare at the driver while shaking his head, visually communicating his upset with the driver’s performance. While I felt badly for the hurt the man complained about, I felt he was being overly rude to the driver who drove in a very expected and safe way.
Shortly after the jolt incident, another man began complaining very loudly about the temperature on the bus which, like the jolt, was not unusual or extreme. He told the other passengers near him that ‘somebody ought to tell the driver that we are too hot!’. To no one’s surprise, no one took up his cause. After about 10 minutes of complaints he finally took matters into his own hands and told the driver, in Russian, that the bus was too hot. The driver did not understand him and I thought how odd it was that he assumed the Azerbaijani driver spoke Russian. While some people do, it still seemed a bizarre assumption to make. Once the man was back to his seat, defeated in his task, he told his seatmate that he studied Russian in school and was excited to use it. While I will not say which school he went to, I assure that it has a reputation for educating some of the world’s wealthiest children. It is of note that the man at no point chose to remove the coat he was wearing.
It was at that moment that I realized: I do not think many of the people on this shuttle have much experience in utilizing public transportation in an urban setting. I was on the struggle bus with folks who seemed unaware of how obvious their lack of lived experience was in this context.
The struggle bus did not let me off when I walked off of the COP29 shuttle. Almost every session, negotiation and presentation I attended that day was a harsh reminder that those in positions of power, with the authority to make lasting impacts on international climate policy, do not live the realities of the climate crisis.
They do not ride the bus to work and therefore do not recognize the needs of the folks who do.
I attended over six sessions on my first day with topics ranging from Article 6, international cooperation, blue carbon, integrating science and nature, responsible mineral mining, etc. All of the speakers and presenters spent considerable time advocating for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples voices, traditional, land-based pedagogy and representation, but none of them included Indigenous people themselves or a methodology to meaningfully incorporate us in the future. At one such discussion a representative from the United States made claims that the U.S. strives to include Indigenous folks at the decision making table but gave no details, tribal names or method descriptions as to how that work was being done. Are we to simply trust the words and promises of those who represent power structures that have subjected Native folks to forced poverty, genocide and cultural persecution for centuries?
On my second day at COP29 I heard teachings from Indigenous women representatives from Tuvalu, Torres Strait, and Aotearoa. Tiana Jakevich of Aotearoa shared some words from their elders which translated from their language to mean:
Indigenous people are of the land. We are of the rivers. Indigenous people are the physical manifestation of the Earth trying to protect itself.
Grace Malie of Tuvalu tearfully recalled visiting places from her childhood to find they are no longer there due to rising waters caused by climate change. She is just 25 years old. The climate crisis is occurring on a tangible timescale which is now altering how Indigenous peoples are able to pass down their teachings. Teachings which career climate change professionals claim they need. But if decision makers do not feel the urgent impacts themselves, can we trust them to act urgently? If they do not ride the struggle bus with us, or at least listen to us, can their vision of sustainability truly support and represent us?
Antavia is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
Antavia descends from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and grew up in South Minneapolis. She earned her associates degree at Minneapolis College as a Power of You scholar and continued her studies in chemistry at Metro State University as an Increasing Diversity in Environmental Careers Fellow, as well as abroad in Cuernavaca, Mexico as a Gilman International Scholar. Antavia has been a PhD student of chemistry at the University of Minnesota where she helped teach undergraduate analytical chemistry labs and spent time researching and synthesizing porous nanoparticles for PFAS phytoremediation as a 3M Science and Technology Fellow. In her work she develops and implements a STEM curriculum that honors and supports Indigenous ways of knowing and cultural protocol for Native American high school students in South Minneapolis. Her work in STEM educational equity has been shown to increase science interest and engagement for Indigenous girls in particular.
The post Who Gets a Seat on the Struggle Bus? appeared first on Climate Generation.
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.
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