Reflecting on COP28 and Looking Ahead

By Alyssa Scheiner

Entering Expo City

As I board my plane home from Dubai after a whirlwind of a week, I am left wondering – what are my key takeaways and what’s next?

This was my first time attending a COP and the most salient advice I got preceding the week was to wear comfortable shoes. Outside of this sage piece of wisdom (I did end up walking over 10 miles on the first day), I am not entirely sure I really knew what I was getting into.

Alyssa standing at the entrance to Expo City

Expo City was at equal times a space for intense negotiations that were deciding the future of our planet, a place for knowledge sharing, and a site for entertainment and the arts. With hundreds of side events to attend and complicated negotiations to navigate, I wanted to split myself into four just so I could get a taste of everything this COP had to offer.

While the experience of COP was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting, it was also impossible to ignore the elephant in the room. Expo City was an impeccable venue that ran like a machine. But the mechanisms that made for a nearly seamless user experience were well-oiled by the extraction of fossil fuels that are killing our planet and are in large part responsible for us needing to have a conference of the parties in the first place. Walking past the OPEC Pavilion left me with a pang in my stomach that I couldn’t overlook, nor did I want to. While the final text of the Global Stocktake (GST) has been lauded for including a call to transition away from fossil fuels, this language has been simultaneously criticized for not being strong enough. 

Notably, the countries most impacted by this decision, the small island developing states, weren’t even in the room when the text was adopted. In a press conference after the draft text of the GST was released, Cedric Shuster, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, declared “we will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.” In a similar fashion, John Silk, head of delegation for the Marshall Islands, said, “the Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant. We came here to fight for 1.5 C and for the only way to achieve that: a fossil fuel phase-out. What we have seen today is unacceptable. We will not go silently to our watery graves.”

These powerful words hang heavy on me as I think about next year’s COP in Azerbaijan, another petrostate. While I am doubtful that we will see strong language on a fossil fuel phaseout in Baku, there are some reasons to be hopeful. Notably, the inclusion of mountain ecosystems, something that this year’s negotiations lacked, would be an important and apt issue for next year’s presidency to take up. As someone who does research in the Rocky Mountains, this prospect is particularly exciting.

Alyssa attended an event called “Restoring Mountain Ecosystems” at the FAO Pavilion on International Mountain Day

And so, as the wheels of this aircraft lift off the tarmac, I am leaving Dubai feeling bittersweet. While I am disappointed by the outcomes, I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be at COP28 and benefit from the labor of thousands of organizers, panelists, and service workers. Finding people across the globe doing similar research as me reminded me that even when I feel siloed in my work, there is a community of people all around the world that care about these issues and are striving to make a difference for my generation and future generations.

Going to COP was a hands-on learning experience that I could never have experienced from a textbook or a classroom seminar. It is quite difficult to conceptualize the circus that is the 80,000+ person climate conference and now I feel that the negotiation process has been elucidated and I have learned a lot about myself, my research interests, and the prospects for my career. I spent most of my time inside events and some of my favorite sessions were from researchers working on tools and methodologies to tell us exactly how we are conceptualizing colossal concepts like capacity building, resilience, and habitability. I feel emboldened to join those who are working to measure these ideas and I hope one day to see my work being cited at events like these.

Until then, I head back to the U.S. with a renewed fervor for the work I am doing to act on my one small part of the climate crisis, and I look forward to seeing how COP29 will bring these issues to the fore once again.

Some members of the Tufts Delegation: Soyoung, Alyssa, Selena, Aarushi, Alexandra, and Shubhangi

Alyssa Scheiner is a MALD candidate at The Fletcher School. Alyssa’s academic interests lie at the intersections of water security, climate migration, and gender and intersectional analysis.