What it’s like negotiating at COP26 as a small island state

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After a pugnacious 2 weeks astatine the Glasgow summit, clime negotiators from tiny land nations bespeak connected their experiences.

Environment 13 November 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

A delegate from the Marshall Islands astatine the COP26 acme connected Thursday.

Climate summits are long, analyzable and emotionally taxing. But for negotiators hailing from the land states facing the worst impacts of clime alteration close now, these talks are captious to the regular lives of everyone they love.

“It’s 2 weeks distant from your family, from your friends, eating precise atrocious nutrient and not sleeping,” says Kristin Qui, a negotiator for Trinidad and Tobago, connected the last Friday of negotiations astatine the COP26 clime summit.

On Thursday she started enactment astatine 8am and finished negotiations astatine 10pm. “That was an aboriginal finish,” she says. For the past 2 weeks she says she has averaged astir six hours of sleep.

Qui is negotiating connected behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States conjugation (Aosis) astatine the COP26 clime summit. It is simply a conjugation of 39 countries – mostly from the Caribbean and South Pacific, including Jamaica, Cuba, Fiji and Antigua and Barbuda.

“We are a radical of precise tiny countries that don’t person a important magnitude of governmental leverage,” says Frances Fuller, a negotiator for Antigua and Barbuda. “But we person spot successful numbers and the motivation precocious crushed – though that’s sometimes not capable to determination the needle.”

“Negotiations are not lone physically exhausting but emotionally exhausting too,” says Qui. “But you person to compartmentalise due to the fact that if you prosecute with that exhaustion your assemblage is going to beryllium similar – I can’t bash this anymore.”

Climate negotiations comprise some nationalist meetings and backstage talks. In nationalist meetings, countries accidental which parts of the projected clime woody they bash and don’t like. “It’s wherever the theatrics happen,” Qui says.

Meanwhile smaller, closed-door meetings revolve astir circumstantial topics specified arsenic clime concern and emanation pledges and are moderated by facilitators. Qui for illustration has spent the acme negotiating Article 6 of the Paris Agreement which details however c markets volition work.

“But the existent discussions hap successful informal meetings wherever determination are nary facilitators,” she says.

These often hap precocious astatine night, says Qui. Fuller says that connected Thursday nighttime she had to hunt retired a South African negotiator done the league centre truthful they could person 1 last treatment astir emission-cutting measures.

“There’s a batch of rhetoric from leaders astir the value of 1.5 degrees and the value of science,” says Fuller. “But past erstwhile you get down to immoderate of the method discussions… determination are different parties successful the country that conscionable privation to erase immoderate references to immoderate instauration of existent science.”

It takes effort to enactment calm. “Here I person a occupation to bash and if I were to spell into hysterics close present – cipher would perceive to me,” she says. Back astatine location however, she says, this is harder to do. “When you spot that not capable is being done – you can’t compartmentalise,” she says.

Pearnel P Charles Junior is Jamaica’s situation curate and 1 of the co-facilitators of the negotiations. Much similar Qui and Fuller, helium says helium has a occupation to do. “I don’t person clip to beryllium disquieted astir who doesn’t get it [the severity of clime change],” helium says. “I person to beryllium concentrating and ensuring they get it earlier we leave.”

“If these negotiations weren’t hard – we wouldn’t request 2 weeks,” helium adds. “I didn’t travel present with an anticipation of having immoderate benignant of expansive bully affair… we are pushing each 2nd for a COP that is palmy truthful that each our children and each of our grandchildren… volition look connected what we did present and spot that we saved them and not that we failed them.”

Although COP26 was owed to decorativeness yesterday, the summit’s third draught agreement was released this greeting and it is hoped that the last pact volition beryllium published aboriginal today.