Good COP, Bad COP: reflections from COP30

What were your takeaways from Good COP, Bad COP?

In a panel one Thursday lunchtime, six experts shared their first reflections on COP30 to a packed room of university students, high school students, and members of the local community. Just days after the COP failed to deliver a way out of fossil fuels or reach meaningful consensus, the tone was not overly positive - "Bad COP" seemed the clear winner.

"The biggest problem I have got is the politicisation of the climate science," said Prof Piers Forster, who presented climate science to the entire COP at the beginning of the conference. "It ought to have been very straightforward to present that, and to get it approved in the final COP document," he said, but the next few days saw much of the text removed. The pushback that caused this, he said, came from "four or five different countries."

Likewise, Zoe Quiroz Cullen shared the real-life impacts of the COPs' slow progress. "We met with delegations from places like Jamaica and the Philippines," she said, "who were reeling from the impacts of climate change on their territories in real time." She emphasised the need for urgency: "By 2030 - and this is time-sensitive - we need to protect and restore as much nature as we can, as quickly as we can."

However, there were some good news moments for the panel.

"The most powerful thing about this COP was the power of the people," said Sienna Bassi, a student at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a representative of Cambridge Climate Society. She emphasised that although some major players did not show up, there is still momentum and the voices of indigenous people and youth had a key role to play.

Dr Joanna Depledge added that, despite the challenges facing it, "perhaps the main achievement of COP30 was to defend multilateralism and the Paris Agreement", she said, remarking that the final text held on to these points. "These may be just words, but in diplomacy, words matter, and these were agreed by consensus." (Check out her LinkedIn post for more.)

Dr Natalie Jones reminded us that COP is not the be-all and end-all. Although a satisfactory agreement wasn't reached, the fact that more than 90 countries insisted on some kind of end to fossil fuels "provides hope for the future". "It also provides," she says, "hooks of accountability. We now have a list of all the countries that have said... we need concrete roadmaps. Citizens of those countries can say, 'Hey government, this is what you were pushing for at COP. Are you walking the walk when it comes to your action on a national level?'"

Likewise, Prof David Reiner praised the togetherness of COP but reiterated that that is not what needs to change to make "greater progress... It is at the national level, we need to see legislations, we need to see regulations come into being that will actually mandate or require the progress that we need to see emissions reductions faster rather than slower."