COPVIEW: on politics, scientists, youth, and society

I have mixed feelings about COP26: it is so important that nations from across the globe are able to convene, as facilitated at COP. But a ‘successful’ COP26 would put us on track for 2.7℃, a level of warming that would make much of the planet unliveable¹.

The net effect of drought, heat stress, crop failure, natural disasters, inundation, and consistently worsening catastrophes will be – without dramatic social, economic and political reorganisation of society – catastrophic for human societies. The first and hardest hit are those in the global south, with climate breakdown accentuating existing inequality and injustice, but essentially no community will avoid the consequences.
— Scientist Rebellion https://scientistrebellion.com/science

I do not expect COP26 to change this, or to adopt and implement policies that start rapidly reducing emissions over the next decade. But I hope that more people will become aware of these injustices and will want climate action on a much bigger scale than currently envisioned by politicians.

In early 2021, following discussions with activists and young people, I initiated the COP VIEW project². Frustrated with the complete avoidance of discussing systemic issues and political change at COP climate change conferences, we proposed holding events in the run-up to COP26 that highlight key missing issues.

COPVIEW didn’t pan out in the way we expected: whilst we attracted attention from scientists, we struggled to get the large youth engagement we had hoped for. In recent discussions about this, different reasons to explain this have been suggested, including the lack of youth representation at an organising level. Whilst we aimed to make organisation horizontal, in reality the meeting times and formats weren’t accessible to everyone.

Despite not being able to make our events as accessible as well as we had hoped, we have been happy to host a wide variety of amazing speakers on vastly different topics, and to have made recordings of these sessions available online³. Events and recordings have been shared on facebook and twitter⁴ with some recordings reaching many more people than were able to attend the live event.