COP30 demystified: is the world any further forward?

We invite you to join in with our COP30 panel discussion, in the style of BBC Radio’s Any Questions.  Please submit your questions for the panel in advance to profstuartreynolds@cantab.net

By the date of our discussion the COP30 meeting will have concluded, but the news from Belém will still be fresh. One of the main functions of this event will be to demystify the political process of COP meetings, allowing our panellists (and audience members) to offer their own judgements on the Belém conference’s successes and failures.

Since Paris in 2015, successive COPs have attempted to codify and promote global scale mechanisms for climate finance including carbon trading, blended finance, damage funds, debt for climate swaps and sovereign climate insurance.  Challenges to radically upscaling climate finance include the persistent funding gap, inequitable distribution, over-reliance on debt, difficulty mobilizing private capital, institutional inefficiencies, underinvestment in nature-based solutions, and weak transparency and tracking systems. There remain serious problems of international and intergenerational justice, ethics and equity. And the USA is not even there.

The big question will be: is the world any further forward after the COP30 meeting?

Panellists for this session:

“Ciara O’Brien (undergraduate student in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bath, project manager and research assistant at SGAIN, also representing “Generation Z”).

Dr Alix Dietzel (University of Bristol, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies and Cabot Institute for the Environment)

Peter Harper (independent researcher, formerly at the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, Wales, one of the original authors of Zero Carbon Britain, also visiting lecturer at University of Bath)

Dr Yixian Sun (University of Bath, Department of Social Policy; Adjunct Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability Sciences, National University of Singapore)

Please submit your questions for the panel in advance to profstuartreynolds@cantab.net