A better future is within reach, if we can act switfly, in line with consensus science, while considering and honoring the rights of all.

Climate Civics International supported civil society observer engagement in the COP29 round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations in Baku in several ways, including: 

• On-site participants
• The People’s Pavilion digital platform
• Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops
• Dispatches and substantive input
• Side events

Our team also engaged through the UNFCCC digital platform for registered COP29 participants and provided background comment to media, other observers, and to key participants in the negotiations. Our Baku Dashboard provides an overview of our activities, and we added to our digital engagement this year a COP29 Tracking Site, which was updated throughout the day, each day of the COP29. 

We had 13 delegates on the ground in Baku, including 2 from the US, 4 from Nigeria, 3 from Ghana, and one each from Cameroon, India, Japan, and Zambia. They joined negotiating sessions as observers, represented civil society networks, and supported national delegations, while joining or leading side events that brought critical substance into the COP29 landscape of policy discussion. 

The COP29 edition of The People’s Pavilion was recognized by the UNFCCC Action for Climate Empowerment team, convened and coordinated by Climate Civics International and the ACE Observatory, with generous support from VoLo Foundation, and in collaboration with the Education Communication and Outreach Stakeholders (ECOS) community, Action for the Climate Emergency, the HBCU Green Fund, IAAI GloCha, Climate Trace, and the Columbia Climate School.

• The platform emerged from the Engage4Climate Network’s OpenCOP effort, aimed at making it easier for people who are not in attendance to witness events, join discussions, feed insights into the process, and engage with participants.
• Through the People’s Pavilion, climate advocates around the world can access live events and be engaged in the process while COP is happening from wherever they are.
• This year, we added a new layer to the People’s Pavilion process—a detailed interactive resource library that provided close to real-time updates on key events and documents, throughout the process.
• During COP29, we live-streamed 323 events to 638 registered People’s Pavilion members; we estimate total engagement with streams posted in the People’s Pavilion at 11,141—an increase of 5% over last year.

The People’s Pavilion launch at COP29 featured themes related to Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), including:

• The role of media and artists in normalizing sustainability and sparking widespread societal shifts;
• The mainstreaming of ACE across UNFCCC processes, ensuring that empowerment reaches all corners of the climate space;
• The intersection of culture and participatory processes as a tool to foster community, inspire change, and deepen engagement.

CCI co-hosted a formal COP29 side event on Agrifood Finance and Enabling Policies to Drive Climate Action, with the FAIRR Initiative and the TAPP Coalition. CCI was represented on the Good Food Finance panel by Myra L. Jackson, a renowned Diplomat of the Biosphere who serves as Climate Change Focal Point for the Earth Law Center and a CCI Board member—and Dr. Michael Terungwa David—founder of the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation and CCI Africa Coordinator. 

• Myra emphasized the importance of stopping the destruction of nature. She urged all to treat the planet as a living thing and to foster, honor, and act in service of the rights of nature.
• Mike focused on the indispensable role of political will in advancing climate solutions. Echoing the call for trust-building, he described relationship-building over time as a key lever for building political will and improving policy design and outcomes for affected communities.

Dr. Isatis Cintrón, a climate scientist who is also a member of the CCI Board and Director of the ACE Observatory, joined negotiations around the start-up and funding of the Loss and Damage Fund. It is essential for principled, informed, inclusive stakeholder voices to contribute to such negotiations, because alongside the obvious questions of funding levels and allocations, there is the need to adapt standard structural arrangements to the real-world needs of people living through dangerous climate disruption.

Part of Isatis’ work to build momentum for robust, ongoing inclusion of stakeholders was the Participation Blueprint for the Loss and Damage Fund, which she published earlier this year through the ACE Observatory. The Blueprint lays out principles for effective participatory process: Inclusivity and non-discrimination; Access to information and transparency; Responsiveness; Equity and equality; Empowerment; and Collaboration.

CCI once again hosted Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops, in collaboration with The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and issued dispatches from the workshops and from the COP29 itself. Access our detailed day to day updates from the COP29, and the full library of our dispatches and reports, below.

Our briefing note on COP29 focus areas called for high ambition and immediate scaling of real solutions to improve lives and livelihoods. We reiterate here our six areas of focus, which can, if optimally implemented, have transformational impact: 

1. Civics, or the genius of local understanding
2. Finance reform, innovation, and instrumentation
3. Article 6.8 non-market cooperation and trade
4. The PARIS Principles and efforts toward a global floor price for pollution
5. Food systems that restore nature and improve health and livelihoods
6. Zero harm as the ambition-setting global goal

We must begin to grapple with new evidence that human activity has already warmed the planet by 1.5°C since 1700, before the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. The COP29 did not make this kind of breakthrough. What we—the global community of climate stakeholders, including future generations—got was incremental improvement in some areas and delayed decisions in others.

On emissions trading, we have new rules, but not strict enough to guarantee justice, efficacy, or inclusive climate-resilient development. As we move forward, CCI will be calling for major progress in resilience-building finance, climate-sensitive debt relief, people-centered pollution pricing, health-building food systems that reward hard-working producers, climate-smart trade, and clean banking.

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A platform for value-building transformation

To support progress in all of these areas, we wish to emphasize the importance of Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement, which reads:

Parties recognize the importance of integrated, holistic and balanced non-market approaches being available to Parties to assist in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions, in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, in a coordinated and effective manner, including through, inter alia, mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity-building, as appropriate. These approaches shall aim to: (a) Promote mitigation and adaptation ambition; (b) Enhance public and private sector participation in the implementation of nationally determined contributions; and (c) Enable opportunities for coordination across instruments and relevant institutional arrangements.

CCI co-leads the Climate Value Exchange, with partners, to create opportunities for advancing the many diverse areas of multilateral climate cooperation that can support a mainstream transition to climate-smart trade and finance.

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