Consensus at COP29? (Bitch Better Have My Money)

COP29 has kicked off this week in Baku. As jaded as some may be about climate diplomacy, all options must be considered, pursued, and exhausted to make a desperately needed dent in the degree of warming.

Most decisions at COP are made by consensus, and “consensus” is not even well defined and agreed on. This is insane. A second of reflection is enough to understand that consensus decision making will likely lead to obstruction and delay - let alone before agreeing to specific criteria for consensus. It’s almost like vested interests wanted to block meaningful action on climate change by baking obstruction into the decision making process. Well…yes. Here is Joanna Depledge explaining how those vested interests disputed the rules of procedure at COP1:

Some political wranglings over the finer points of the rules of procedure were to be expected. But what should have been a rather routine matter escalated into a major political storm in the run-up to COP1, when members of the oil producers’ cartel the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) – principally Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, also Nigeria, Iran and others – began to argue that there should be no “last resort” voting rule at all. Instead they argued that substantive decisions should be taken only by consensus.

The challenge of consensus decision-making in UN climate negotiations, Joanna Depledge (05/03/2024)

Now, one could reasonably conclude that COP is just a sham. Fossil capital is just mocking us, bringing the weight of its accumulated power to bear on the scales, tipping them decisively in favour of planetary destruction. Alternatively, it might be regarded as a miracle that even the most watered down of commitments emerges at all from COP. This is more miraculous given such a tight schedule that rarely overruns…

To understand how fraught with difficulty this whole operation is, the good people at Carbon Brief publish a wonderful table on “who wants what at COP”:

The first column shows countries and UN negotiating blocs. The second column shows the topics up for debate (e.g. adaptation, finance). The third column shows specific issues within those topics. And the final column indicates the position that each grouping is likely to take on each particular issue at the summit. Carbon Brief explains the positions like so:

This ranges from “high priority” – meaning the grouping is likely to be strongly pushing the issue – to “red line”, which means the grouping is likely to oppose this issue and show no room for compromise.

Importantly, the entries for this table are based on Carbon Brief’s annual assessment of submissions to the UNFCCC, public statements, and wider research. I have confirmed with Carbon Brief in private correspondence that the ratings (priority, oppose etc.) are their interpretation. I also double checked some issues I had with the table that they were kind enough to fix up (legit they’re so great).

I’m not sure how Carbon Brief manage to do all this. It sounds like a lot of work. They’ve published this table before the widespread use of LLMs as well. For the moment, I’m just going to trust that this table is a reasonable approximation of positions that countries/blocs have at COP. Carbon Brief do mention it is a live document that they intend to update. In any case, it’s pretty cool and useful. We can look through the table and see the aims of negotiators and the various red lines.

Even so, I was thinking this table could be rearranged to get a big picture look at consensus and conflict at COP. I suspect COP-goers and organisers have something like this already. What we’re looking for is a high level overview of the strategic picture at COP. Thinking back to the issues with consensus decision making, such a visual would lay bare how much of a miracle or a farce the whole operation is. Here is the great big picture I came up with - a heatmap where the columns are the countries/blocs and the rows are specific issues. The colours are the positions of each country or bloc. The lines at the top and side are dendrograms grouping similar countries/blocs and specific issues. Similarity is measured with hierarchical clustering, and observations that are closer together, as mapped by the dendogram, are more similar: