Dispatch From UN Climate Change Conference: Tuesday, Nov. 18

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

Here at COP30, where the world is looking to national leaders to take action on climate change, high-level negotiators have a huge task on their plates.

As Simon Stiell, who leads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said yesterday: “Clearly there is a huge amount of work ahead for ministers and negotiators. I urge you to get to the hardest issues—fast. When these issues get pushed deep into extra time, everybody loses. We absolutely cannot afford to waste time on tactical delays or stonewalling. The time for performative diplomacy has now passed.”

As the cascading climate crises our planet faces become more complex, it’s not enough for one nation to act on its own: What we need is cross-border collaboration and knowledge-sharing, as several COP national negotiators told us during a special Food Tank happy hour yesterday.

“We need to solve these issues together. We are dependent on one another. We share scientific knowledge…we have many ways we [rely on] on our neighbors,” says Anna Salminen, a food and agriculture negotiator from Finland. 

As Adam Schalimtzek, Director of International Relations for Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, added: “Every country can find something they can learn from each other.”

Yesterday at COP30, a group of international governments, agencies, NGOs, and other coalition members launched the Bioeconomy Challenge, a three-year platform designed to build measurable climate and development action—including goals of the Paris Agreement and the COP30 Action Agenda—via the bioeconomy, which refers to an economic model based on renewable resources rather than fossil fuels.

“Through this initiative, we are building bridges between the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples and traditional communities and the rigor of modern science; between metrics that reveal the true value of nature and the financing that reaches those who truly protect the territories; and between markets and the necessary maintenance of standing forests, living rivers, and the socio-biodiversity that sustains life,” said Marina Silva, Brazil’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change.

Already at COP30, we’re seeing some action on phasing out fossil fuels. South Korea announced it would close all coal-fired power plants by 2040 as part of its decision to join the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which counts about 60 nations and even more local governments and businesses as members. Brazil also unveiled a plan to cut industrial emissions as part of a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, and as a member of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, Colombia is set to hold an international conference in April on phasing out fossil fuels.

These steps are welcome, of course—and as we also know, 2040 or 2050 commitments are not happening at the pace we need to see. I’m pleased to see some countries emerge as leaders in pushing their global counterparts to act on an even quicker timeline than what’s being discussed at COP30. 

As Ralph Regenvanu, Minister of Climate Change of Vanuatu, told The Guardian, “We are trying to bring ambition back into this process… We need the whole world to do (this) with us.”

So I’m hopeful that the COP30 Bioeconomy Challenge will be another force for kickstarting global partnerships for climate action, because we can’t move forward without coordination and standardization.

“To help global bioeconomy grow at scale, we need to anchor it in context-specific, transparent, and comparable indicators so that sustainability means the same everywhere,” said Kaveh Zahedi, Director of the FAO Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment.

As climate change becomes more multifaceted, we need system-wide solutions that respond to the challenges we’re facing today, not the challenges we faced 30 years ago. And at all levels of government—from high-level UN negotiating tables to national Congress halls to local city council meeting rooms—the leaders we need are those who recognize that climate solutions must be rooted in collaboration, not competition.

(Danielle Nierenberg is the President of Food Tank and can be reached at danielle@foodtank.com)