As co-president of the Oxford Climate Society this year, I was part of the Oxford University delegation at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. It was my first COP, something I learnt would generate sympathetic nods and smiles from surrounding COP veterans. As a finalist, in hindsight, heading to Azerbaijan for 5th week was a brave idea for my degree! Nonetheless, it gave me a behind-the-scenes appreciation of the challenges and frustrations of being a student at the conference and some of the positive takeaways.
Getting there was challenging. Information online about tickets, badges, funding, and support was scarce. We quickly worked out that it is a game of who you know. After wrangling with tutors to be granted permission to take leave to attend, fellow Climate Society co-president Ushika Kidd and I were the first undergraduates to be part of the University’s COP delegation.
And yet, as Oxford undergraduates, the challenges of convincing Somerville tutors paled compared to other student activists. I spoke to an Afghan climate activist and founder of the Climate and Environment Youth Initiative, pushing for Afghan youth voices. An outspoken female advocate, she had declined to feature on camera in a YouTube video for fear of retaliation from the Taliban on her return to Afghanistan.
The week was pretty busy! At COP, events happen pretty much 24/7. They occur in three main spaces: the first is the ‘Blue Zone’, which has countries’ pavilions and offices and is where the negotiations happen. The ‘Green Zone’ is essentially a corporate Freshers’ Fair, filled with the likes of Morgan Stanley. A third arena for the conference is the city of Baku itself, where informal events, discussions, and parties occur. On the first morning of the conference, I spent time stumbling between different country pavilions (including speaking on a panel on Youth Advocacy at China’s pavilion), meeting youth delegates, and attending a working group on human rights. We made it to a Climate Cardinals’ event out in the city in the evening, meeting other Oxford students and youth delegates. But I hadn’t reached a negotiation and wasn’t even sure how to. I’d made it to Azerbaijan, but I wasn’t sure I’d engaged with COP itself.
The language of COP is obtuse, especially for students without decades-long careers behind them. Even as a quick learner, the range of acronyms – NCQG, LDCs, SIDS, NAPs, WIMs and so on – prevent you from understanding what’s happening. There aren’t any ‘COP for dummies’ books around. By day two, though, things started to become more apparent. I went into the negotiations with an Observer badge – although you couldn’t talk, something that would become frustrating. Nonetheless, it became clear who was blocking negotiations and what the sticking points were. With this knowledge, students like myself would report to various working groups, build cases on specific issues, or write policy recommendations and take them to negotiators.
After successive frantic emails to UK politicians (even tracking them down and cornering them in person), it was possible to have several one-on-one meetings. We focused on the experience of student activists in Oxford, the education policies on climate grounded in our experience working with local primary and secondary schools, and health inequalities in the UK linked to air pollution, brought to our attention by Oxford students. Meetings involved a lot of leg work to be taken seriously by politicians, and they often rebuffed us with the familiar tone of “this isn’t UK policy”.
Before heading back to Oxford, I had hoped to see the talks I’d been following wrapped up and agreed upon. One such negotiation was on the development of technologies to address climate change. The final negotiation had two draft texts, Version 1 and Version 2. Negotiators had an hour to finalise the text. They started 15 minutes late and then spent 40 minutes debating whether to consider Version 1 with the highlighted additions or Version 2 with the highlighted editions. That’s the same thing.
With five minutes left, the chairs explained there wasn’t time to negotiate the text further; they would have to call to postpone it to June 2025. Countries couldn’t even agree on the nature of the postponement. Speaking on behalf of developing countries, Uganda said they wanted this draft text to be the basis of the June negotiations. The EU, Korea, and the UK wanted this text scrapped so they could start afresh. Norway even suggested postponing until the next COP in November 2025. The irony is that this ‘debate’ took 35 minutes, enough time to have finalised the text. I sat there frustrated, thinking, ‘If you’d only hand me the microphone, I’d sort it out!’
Nonetheless, the amount of help and support from strangers who wanted young people in those rooms was incredible. We were able to push an agenda and lobby politicians, ministers, and journalists, making fantastic connections along the way. There was room for fun, too. A particular highlight was ending up at a Cuban bar in Baku City with 100 delegates from Latin America and being taught Salsa (but failing miserably).
COP29 set a precedent for other students and undergraduate voices to attend, supported by Oxford, and to represent our communities at the highest levels. So I’m not leaving disillusioned, although disappointed with the conference outcome. The work of the Oxford Climate Society and other Oxford activists was to bring our experience to the table to advance the COP process. It demonstrates that everyone – students as much as anyone else – has a right to be heard.