Sponsored by the Office of Sustainability, 14 student fellows from the University of Connecticut attended the United Nations 29th annual Climate Change Conference of Parties, hosted this November in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Since COP 21 in 2015, UConn has sent a delegation of students and faculty to participate in the global summit, the purpose of which is to discuss solutions to the climate crisis. Many of the students were attending the conference for the first time and prepared themselves for the experience in a variety of ways.
Dylan Steer, a fourth-year student majoring in environmental studies and political science with a minor in Middle Eastern studies noted his excitement at being approved to attend the summit.
“I’ve applied in years past. I applied to go to Egypt for COP 27, and I didn’t get to go, so I tried to talk to as many people who had gone on the trips before and get a sense for what it’s like, what the atmosphere is inside the conference, but also what it’s like being in a different city with all these climate champions,” said Steer, who serves as the president of UConn Storrs environmental group EcoHusky.
Noting their passion for the subject of conservation at the center of COP, Kamala Chuss, a fourth-year marine sciences major from UConn Avery Point explained, “I started preparing all my life through my studies.”
Alan Cavagnaro, a fourth-year political science and Urban & Community Studies major with a minor in public policy, detailed how COP attendees with critical perspectives were closely monitored prior to their arrival at the summit.
“A week before COP started all of us registrants got an email from the government basically saying, if you want to protest, you have to register it through us,” said Cavagnaro. “In the 1910s Baku used to be just an oil wasteland. So, I think there’s a sense of, you know, there’s not much we can say, besides from a protester that registered with the government.”
The conference was held over the course of two weeks, with the first week open only to the 198 officially recognized parties to the UN for the World Leaders Climate Action Summit. When UConn students arrived for the second week on Monday, Nov. 18, the conference was already “at the height of negotiations,” remarked Cavagnaro.
Sectioned into two separate areas, students budgeted time between the Blue Zone, which hosted panels and negotiations, and the Green Zone, which featured state and corporate demonstrations of sustainability initiatives. Expressing sentiments shared by each of the group members, Cavagnaro stated, “The Blue Zone was awesome compared to the Green Zone … the Green Zone was really depressing.”
Throughout the Green Zone, Steer explained how oil and gas-oriented companies and nations ‘greenwashed’ themselves to appear eco-friendly.
“Fossil fuel interests were at COP and presenting this whole side of themselves that is basically fraudulent,” noted Steer. “One example was the SOCAR energy company, which is the National Petroleum Company of Azerbaijan. And it’s just SOCAR Green, and it’s talking about all their green efforts, but they’re going to the Azerbaijani economy.”
Speaking with greater optimism, Chuss noted the valuable insights they gained from the different themed pavilions in the summit’s Blue Zone.
“I learned about how negotiations are actually done, and how science has kind of played out on an international scale, and the applications of science,” said Chuss. “I went to the Ocean Pavilion and spent a lot of time there just meeting people [and] making connections.”
Noting the highlights of his time at COP, Cavagnaro picked out a moment when the Attorney General of Fiji expressed concern over the unequal ability of less developed nations in implementing climate solutions.
“He was talking about, you know, we’re here readdressing the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, and there’s a lot of countries, like Fiji, for example, who are bleeding, who don’t have the necessary funds to do a lot of these goals that you want us to do,” emphasized Cavagnaro. “In order to fund us it needs to be tangible.”
Each of the COP attendees remarked positively on the People’s Plenary, a panel discussion near the summit’s conclusion that hosted delegates from nations in vulnerable states of war.
“That was where the most truth that I heard being spoken was,” said Steer. “It was from stellar speakers from particularly conflicted areas of the world. There was a Palestinian speaker, a Lebanese speaker, a Sudanese speaker, a Ukrainian speaker. And then to close it out, there was someone who just was talking about the intersections of the climate crisis with all these conflicts.”
For a full discussion of COP 29, students can attend the Climate Change Cafe on Dec. 4 in the Student Union Ballroom from 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., where COP attendees will provide greater detail on their experiences in Baku.