When news of COP28 was still coming out, announcing the presidency and expected participants in early October, or rather when I started keeping up with news of it, my first thought was “I hope I get to attend COP sometime in the future.” A month or so later, I received that fateful email inviting people to apply for the COP28 Student Experience Trip in Georgetown and I rushed to make my dream come true. I was excited to hear back, and couldn’t believe that I was going to attend the biggest annual environmental conference, this time in Dubai.
Once I was there, to be honest, I felt a disconnect between the news I was reading every morning before heading to COP28 and my actual experience there. Due to the separation between the Blue and Green Zone, along with our unfortunate situation where we could not get Blue Zone badges on time, it seemed like the ‘important’ parts covered in the news all took place in the Blue Zone, while everything else was happening in the Green Zone. There were panels, talks, exhibitions, all promoting and selling products and services, which is the main part that surprised me. Going into COP28, I expected a completely plastic-free, environmentally conscious use of spaces, and while there was some of that, such as the solar panels in Expo City (pictured), I was still seeing plastic cups and hearing news of celebrities flying in with private jets. So, although it was overall environmentally friendly, it still left much to be desired in terms of consumerism. This is not to say that the Green Zone was completely irrelevant or useless, the opposite in fact, I learned quite a lot during my time there and made some meaningful connections, but I was not expecting to see so much for-profit business taking place there. Although some were non-profit organizations and start-ups that were doing meaningful work and attended seeking sponsors, I wanted to focus on the other side of COP28 because it came as a surprise to me, and I wanted to share that for students’ future reference.
Perhaps one thing that I couldn’t help but notice, a thread connecting most, if not all, the events and panels I attended, was the focus on capitalism and consumerism in COP28. Whether or not this is part due to the country it was hosted in (Dubai is, after all, known for its materialistic flair) is unclear as I have not attended enough COPs to make that comparison. One of the most striking instances of this included one of the talks I attended on my first day there, titled “Heat, Health, and Hard Truths: The Consequences of Living in a Warming World.” Naturally, I was expecting to hear a healthcare perspective on the expected 1.5°C rise in temperature. Perhaps the first red flag should have been the panelists, one of whom was Antonio Di Cecca, CEO of Tabreed, along with a senior fellow at Kite Insights, the Executive Vice President of Emirates Global Aluminium. Their main concerns seemed to be worker productivity loss due to heat, rather than the actual health issues due to an increasingly heated world, saying “human productivity goes down by 1% after every 25°C,” and “in New Delhi, ¼ of your income evaporates in the heat.” Since that was the main concern of the talk, other than “collaborative economics”, I felt that the talk was very disappointing.
On the other hand, I attended another talk on “Financing a Gender Just Transition,” which I found much more interesting and eye-opening. One of the panelists, Emanuela Pozzan, made some very good points on the care economy’s role in financing a gender just transition, asserting that encouraging women and girls into STEM was not the solution since those sectors are designed by men for men, rather we need to focus on creating better conditions for women to work in STEM. Moreover, she concluded that “there is no capitalist economy without the care economy, since capitalism thrives on unpaid labor,” which I felt summarized her points perfectly. This is one of the talks that I found the most informative and powerful, compared to the other talks I attended that would often either conclude with a cry for ‘raising awareness’ or promoting their own products and services.
To conclude, my personal experience at COP28 was eye-opening in several ways. The most striking one for me, as discussed above, was the focus on capitalism and consumerism during it. I believe that capitalism and consumerism not only go hand-in-hand, but are both instrumental to achieving all our climate goals, from net zero emissions to overall climate justice, and seeing them both alive and well at COP28 was, at the very least, thought-provoking.
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