COP29: What it’s like behind the scenes at the world’s largest climate conference

Lecturer in Journalism, Dr Tim Neff, will be attending COP29 as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and shares his experience of previous COPs.  

COP29 will take place in Azerbaijan, from Monday 11 – Friday 22 November, and is expected to host between 40,000 and 50,000 delegates, including diplomats, scientists, activists and industry leaders.  

COP (Conference of the Parties) involves representatives from nearly every country coming together on an annual basis to discuss and negotiate climate action.  

At every COP meeting, there is a focus on addressing progress since the last COP, as well as discussions and negotiations to look at the responsibilities countries should have and what ambitions should be decided.  

Some of the usual discussions include things around reducing emissions, sustainability, and financial commitments to tackling climate change.  

How did you get invited to COP29, and how have you been involved in previous COP conferences? 

Since 2022, I've been a writer for a publication called Earth Negotiations Bulletin. 

I had a colleague in the PhD programme at New York University (NYU) who started writing for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and we’re both interested in researching climate and environmental issues. She said, “Oh, with your journalism background, you might be interested in doing this”. So, I applied for it and started in 2022. The first meeting I covered was a World Urban Forum in Poland that summer. 

My friend has been the leader on one of these reporting teams that goes to the COPs specifically, so I started working with her on that team in 2022 at COP27, which was in Egypt. This is now my third time at COP for Earth Negotiations Bulletin. 

How does the Earth Negotiations Bulletin run? 

It's published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which is based in Canada, but the team members come from around the globe. ENB sends teams of writers, editors, photographers and videographers to UN talks throughout the year to report on what positions countries’ diplomats are taking on our behalf – and how well governments are collaborating on environmental crises. They cover dozens of UN talks, not just the big climate COPs.  

For COP29, Earth Negotiations Bulletin will send two teams. The climate COP is such a huge thing - it's one of the biggest, if not the biggest negotiations that they do every year. So they send two teams. One focuses on the main negotiations, and the other team is the one I'm on, which is focused on the side events that governments and NGOs host to discuss specific issues. 

What was your experience like last year in Dubai at COP28, and what did your work consist of by attending the conference? 

Last year was probably very similar to what it's going to be like this year. There are two different zones at these COPs, there's a Blue Zone and a Green Zone. The Blue Zone is where the negotiations happen and also where they have these pavilion areas.  

I don't know what the setup will be like in Azerbaijan, but the way it typically is, is that groups like UN agencies, national governments and NGOs, set up these pavilions within the venue where they host a variety of events throughout the COP, and these are known as side events, and they are usually a variety of different types of things.  

They are typically panel discussions, where there'll be a mix of national delegates, negotiators, and civil society representatives of organisations who are discussing various issues around the COP. For example, one of the ones that I covered last year was a side event run by the Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the UN agencies, and they were hosting panel discussions around food, food systems and agriculture, and how they could achieve carbon reductions in that sector around the world. 

Along with a photographer, I go to the side events. I would sit there and furiously type notes while the photographer would be taking photos, and then we would run back to the media centre where our office is, and write it up, and the photographer would process the photos, and we put it all together into a write up that goes online. 

Are there any specific people you’re expecting to meet at COP29? 

I meet with various journalists that I've involved in my research, and those I have interviewed for my research in the past.  

I’ve actually been in conversation with them recently to see if I could set up a time to interview one of them and bring them into classes to speak to students. I'm looking for ways to integrate it more into my teaching and my research as I go forward with it.  

I also tend to meet people that I've met before. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin team itself is a pretty close-knit group of people, and I know a lot of team members. It’s always great to see them again.  

What message do you want to send to world leaders? 

I think the message that I would send is probably the message that most people would tend to direct at the climate negotiations, which is that it's time for action. We're now almost 10 years after the Paris Climate Agreement. 

It's time to unlock the finance that's required to get something done about climate change. These are issues that they've been wrestling with for years, if not decades, and they're still involved in very tense negotiations around how you define flows of money and who's administrating that, and who gets it. And that's one of the key issues that has come up over and over again at the COPs; how do you get those flows of finances to help countries to transition to greener economies? It's going to take money to do that, especially for developing countries.  

This COP is considered a finance COP, where they're supposed to come up with a new financial goal, a quantity to flow annually toward developing countries to help them to transition. And that's the key thing negotiators really need to work on. 

What is your biggest concern about climate change? 

It's an intensifying problem. It is beset by complex competing interests among different sectors of society and different nations. The concern is that achieving measurable action on it is very difficult to do. Despite years and years of these negotiations, the problem is getting worse.  

My concern is that we're getting to a point where the window for really effective action that's going to prevent more than the 1.5C rise in average global temperature is rapidly closing. And then you start to think about, what does it mean if we don't meet that goal?’ 

Are you taking any steps in your daily life to reduce your carbon footprint? 

We can all do more, can't we? I like to think that I'm a responsible consumer, but we should all be responsible consumers, recycling and thinking about our carbon footprints. Ultimately, we need to take more action as a collective, to pressure governments to do more at the policy making level. The biggest contributors to the problem are at that level.  

Whether it's fossil fuel interests, or nation states that have the ability to set policies that can have major impacts on emissions levels – that's really where the action has to happen. But it’s not just a top-down thing. The pressure needs to come from the bottom up.  

One of the things I'm doing is continuing my work at the COP because it is important to produce these accounts to keep the public apprised of what's happening. People need to be engaged in it, learning more about it, understanding it, but really importantly, connecting with people. 

It's really difficult to point to things that we do in our personal lives that are going to have a major impact. But the more we can do to engage with it and connect with other people, is ultimately going to be what it takes. 

What hopes do you have for future generations in terms of climate action? 

Every generation has a responsibility to do something for it, and I would hope that future generations feel engaged with it. We’ve seen wonderful rising engagement from youth, over the past five to ten years. Youth voices have really risen up, in a way, and have taken the lead in a lot of ways on this.  

My hope is that that carries over from generation to generation.