Inside COP26: reflections from a climate negotiator

After nearly 10 years of being climate change policy advisor and negotiator for the UK government I have left to be Practice Director of Climate and Sustainability at the Global Counsel. Now seems like a good opportunity to reflect back on #cop26.

One of the more frequent questions I get asked is "what do you do as a negotiator?"

Climate negotiations are often compared to ordering food in a restaurant, except there are 196 of you and you all need to agree on one menu. If one person objects to a single ingredient, no one gets their dinner. They don’t take place in just four weeks across the November COP and the June intersessional. They are an on-going process throughout the year(s) before. If you’ve made it to COP and you don’t already have broad agreement it’s like you’re sitting down to the meal, hungry, and then trying to decide the menu and still need to send the chef out to buy the ingredients. It’s critical to be able to tell whether, when your fellow negotiator says “I don’t like this”, it’s because they’re allergic to it or because they’d just prefer a different sauce.

As a climate negotiator my primary role was to support stretched negotiators from other countries - explaining the issues, the implications of different outcomes and how different wording might work for them. This in itself solved most differences in position. Very few negotiation positions come from fundamental political differences. Even where they did, these negotiators are people who have chosen to work on climate change, so (almost without exception) they are personally passionate about the issues and driven to make the world a better place. Working with them to find the positive course of action within the constraints of their country’s political position solved the remainder of the problems. 

Some countries struggle to engage with the negotiations – often having the remit of an entire UK government department covered by a single person. Covid dramatically exacerbated this. One of the primary challenges of the last two years was getting time in negotiators' diaries, often those from the most climate vulnerable countries, to talk about the issues which really affected them. Many were also leading their countries’ response to the covid crisis. 

Being the UK presidency's lead on adaptation negotiations represented a whole new challenge. You are now the waiter instead of a hungry patron. You do not have a negotiation position; all you can do is to create the right environment for constructive discussion and offer to draft the menu for them. It's been repeated many times and I repeat now without any of the constraints of actually working for the government: the UK incoming presidency genuinely didn’t have a position but was guided by the best available science. The goal as presidency is to make everyone equally unhappy[1] while getting the most ambitious outcome possible.

The first week of the COP I spent listening to Parties’ views to understand exactly what their position was ahead of drafting the presidency text in the second week. Contrary to popular opinion, as presidency I couldn’t just put whatever I wanted in the text. Even the name of the Glasgow Sharm El Sheikh Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation’s (GlaSS) went through several iterations and rounds of approval with Parties. You can propose a wild idea (or even just a sensible one) but that would inevitably result in the text being rejected. Consensus from all countries is needed for a text to be agreed, and as presidency, failure is not an option. 

The second week is when the presidency takes over responsibility for delivering the final text. I knew every position inside out and blindfolded but, on little sleep, the logistical challenge of bringing Parties together to finalise the text felt like climbing a mountain. As the UK presidency's lead negotiator on adaptation, in any given moment I needed to decide on: which negotiation sessions are needed, how many, their format, the level (ministers, heads of delegation or negotiators), what sized room, room temperature, the room layout, whether all countries attend or groups, brushbys, bilats, trilats, quints etc etc etc. The options for bringing parties together are seemingly endless and although can seem like a minor issue, it is critical to the success of discussions. And that’s before you factor in the negotiations themselves and the drafting of the actual text, one full stop, comma and "as appropriate" at a time. Thankfully I had the help of my team, the UNFCCC secretariat, and two amazing ministers to help draft text and herd Parties to a successful conclusion.

Glasgow concluded with a momentous shift forward, whilst achieving the elusive goal of near-equal unhappiness. As well as progressive outcomes on the rulebook, carbon markets, adaptation and loss and damage there was a significant shift in political will on issues such as coal (even with the late change from “phase out” to "phase down"). The agreement on coal and the shamelessly ambitious cover decision (known in this case as the “Glasgow Climate Pact”) represents the beginning of a change to the role of the UNFCCC. Never before has it been agreed that action would be taken on fossil fuels in the cover decision.

With the process for implementing the Paris Agreement now agreed, the challenge is how to keep up political momentum and hold feet to the fire. How do you keep attracting the attention of world leaders every year as the Paris agreement reaches the point in its life where it goes through and endless cycle of plan, implement, review? The cover decisions, which started life as an insignificant chapeaux, look set to take on a life of their own to drive forward and focus political ambition on tangible actions. 

[1] The response “unhappy” is one of those long running UNFCCC in-jokes which nearly always means the person is delighted with the text but doesn’t want anyone else to know. The trick is to watch for the glint in the other negotiator’s eye. For obvious reasons, it does not translate well to those outside the bubble. You’ll often see reported in the media that a country is unhappy with text that was, in actual fact, written by that country.