Is COP no longer fit for purpose?  

The 2015 Paris Agreement is often considered a watershed moment for climate action – because here, 196 parties signed a legally binding treaty, agreeing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to below 2oC above pre-industrial levels. It was by no means a perfect agreement, but it provided a reason for hope because it indicated that those at the top, in positions of power, were united in their commitment.  

It feels like we’ve come a long way from there. And not necessarily in the right direction.  

This year, COP29 was held in Baku Azerbaijan- a country where oil and gas account more than 90% of their exports. Further, more than 1,700 coal and gas lobbyists were given access, outnumbering the delegations of almost every country at the conference. If the apparent irony of that isn’t enough, investigative journalists from Global Witness got to the core of the hypocrisy. Using the event to complete an undercover investigation, they exposed the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s COP29 team – Elnur Soltanov, using the summit to make underhand fossil fuel deals. Here, they found that the man appointed to drive decarbonisation, was speaking of a future with fossil fuels, ‘perhaps forever’.  

With all of this in mind it’s hard to feel hopeful. It feels like what was once a symbol of collective action has been co-opted by corporate interests and transformed into a stage for greenwashing. COP is now an entity that many activists, including Greta Thunberg, have lost faith in.  

We have reached a point where climate change is a problem in the collective conscience. Climate anxiety is something we have in common, but consistently, concern is failing to translate into necessary action.  

The Psychology of Climate Inaction 

One of the greatest barriers to climate action is not scientific or technological – it’s psychological. Human brains are wired for survival – our instincts prioritise immediate, visible threats over distant or far off worries. This is called psychological distancing, and with the climate crisis, it plays out in three main ways: 

Primarily, Humans struggle to make choices that prioritise long-term benefits over immediate rewards. Most famously, we’ve seen this in the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, where young children favour the instant gratification of eating one marshmallow above waiting for two. Indeed, we see the human tendency for temporal discounting play-out with the climate crisis. While the reward of saving humanity by taking climate action now is considerably higher than the rewards of saving some money and continuing ‘life as normal’, the time taken to see the decision ‘pay-off’ means the future benefit is significantly discounted.   

Further, the issue of psychological distancing also manifests in the way our minds separate ‘the self’ from ‘the other’. Firstly, this exhibits in terms of responsibility. While the most developed countries are historically responsible for driving climate change, people in these nations – who are now struggling with their own set of socio-economic challenges – feel significantly distanced from the ‘other’ they perceive as responsible for emissions of the past. These people are then largely unwilling to pay the due reparations to support developing nations through the crisis, because they do not feel a connected sense of personal responsibility.   

Finally, the psychological distance between self and other plays out in the climate crisis because the impacts are uneven. While across the world we are witnessing the impacts of climate change, the greatest impacts are being felt by developing countries and island states. With this, delegates from the wealthiest nations tend to discount the cost of climate change, because the most significant impacts are felt by ‘the other’ and remain to them somewhat abstract.  

The problem with climate change is that the temporal, political and physical distance between the cost and the benefit, between the decision-maker and the reality – is too big. Indeed, at COP, it seems our leaders are still in a state of mental infancy, deciding to scoff the first marshmallow, as they choose immediate profit over long-term survival. The problem is – as we continue marching towards several tipping-points, we are losing the chance for any such delayed gratification.  

That being said, we cannot give up but must keep pushing for change – because COP might still be our best chance of averting climate breakdown. As activists, we should accept progress but never stop pushing for more. We should celebrate $300billion a year being pledged to support developing nations, but we must insist that these be gifts not loans and remain committed to obtaining the $1.3 trillion required. The loss and damages fund also signifies progress, but while we put the promised $720million to good use, we must remind leaders that the actual estimated cost of damages could be $671 billion each year by 2030. Much more needs to be done.  

Ultimately, we should expose the greenwashing, we should unveil the psychological biases that hinder reasonable decision-making and call out leaders who have betrayed people across the world – now and in the future. But we cannot succumb to despair and must resist any desire to bury our heads in the sand. We need to continue to pressure leaders – to remain committed to the promises made in the Paris agreement and commit more-significant grant-based financial support to developing countries. We must come together and continue pressuring action – because with climate action we’re in it for the long-haul.