(This article was published in 2018 on the Profiles of Paris website at https://profilesofparis.com/profiles/ )
In Paris, I was responsible for a publication that negotiators referred to simply as “the ENB”, an electronic newsletter and website that everyone read each morning to figure out what was going on across COP 21 and, particularly, “In the Corridors.”
With a team of thirty-five writers, photographers, videographers, video producers and logistics coordinators, supported by a dozen digital editors and translators working offsite all around the world, we published from Paris a steady stream of content on our website at http://enb.iisd.org/climate/COP 21/ and through Twitter, Facebook and even in hardcopy for the technologically challenged delegates. For the more than two weeks at Le Bourget, our team worked around the clock from our office in Hall 4.
The Earth Negotiations Bulletin and our other information products, including coverage of side events (“ENB on the Side” and video reporting) kept the tens of thousands of participants in Paris informed and generated millions of views of our online content by readers worldwide.
But our preparations for Paris began years before arriving in France. These included assembling the team of climate policy experts who could synthesize the negotiations into a single report each day. We also had to raise the resources needed to mount this huge information project. Finally, our team spent more than two decades working with the UNFCCC Secretariat in securing the trust, the political will and connections that allowed our team from the International Institute for Sustainable Development unprecedented access into the contact groups and informal negotiations that delivered the Paris Accord.
We began our 2015 Paris campaign early in the year. Our largest pre-meeting contribution was a video project that we called “The Paris Knowledge Bridge: Unpacking International Climate Governance”. In the months leading up to Paris, several of us working on the Earth Negotiations Bulletin created a historical retrospective that could be used by professors in their university curricula, teaching about climate change governance. During the first half of 2015 we sent out videographers to interview more than sixty people who were part of the history of climate government, including the Chair of the Berlin Mandate Raul Estrada, former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Michael Zammit-Cutajar, then Assistant Secretary General Janos Pasztor and former UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. In four videos we provided an introduction to the history, issues, actors and dynamics in global climate governance, bringing the story of climate governance by those who make, implement and remake institutions for climate change. The four videos were:
- The History of Climate Governance
- The Pillars of Climate Governance
- The Science and Economics of Climate Governance
- The State of Play in the UNFCCC Negotiations
Gathering the financial resources for COP 21 was also a huge challenge. Competition by NGOs for funding in the year before Paris was intense, with many organizations competing for resources. 2015 was also a particularly busy year for us at IISD since we were following the negotiations taking place at UN Headquarters in New York for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted in September.
In the end, we successfully raised (and then spent) more than US$300,000 during the two weeks in Paris. We received specific funding for COP 21 from the European Commission and the Government of Italy, but our single largest contribution came from the most unlikely of sources; we convinced the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to support our coverage of the climate change negotiations leading up to, and including, Paris!
Two years previously, following Warsaw COP 19, I had flown to Saudi Arabia to make a presentation at Saudi Aramco on the upcoming climate change process and the importance of reaching an agreement in Paris. With the departure of Ambassador Al-Saban, who had been the Head of the Saudi Delegation on climate and energy matters since Rio in 1992, I’d sensed a shift in Saudi’s position in the negotiations. Indeed, under the leadership of Khalid Abuleif, Chief Climate Negotiator for the Climate Agreements, Saudi Arabia had begun pursuing a path towards greater engagement in the climate change negotiations, as well as beginning a shift domestically to sustainable and renewable energy use and investments in clean technologies. By providing funding for IISD and the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Saudi Arabia sent a clear signal to the entire climate policy community that it was contributing towards the success of Paris by investing in a global information resource that everyone in the process appreciated. In a series of agreements with Saudi Aramco, IISD received funding for our coverage of COP 20 in Lima, the meetings of the subsidiary bodies in Bonn in 2014-2015 and our ENB, side events and video coverage in Paris.
However, our largest investment at COP 21 was not in travel, hotels and meals, but in intellectual capital. We assembled some of the brightest Ph.D.’s, international environmental lawyers and policy analysts at Le Bourget to listen, write, synthesize, analyze and explain to the world what was happening inside the negotiations. We issued contracts to our consultants from Kenya, Canada, the US, Finland, South Africa, Germany, Nepal, Greece, Russia, the UK, Sweden, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil, and Norway.
And then, just as everyone was about to fly in from around the world, the attacks took place at the Bataclan theatre and at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, very near where we were planning to stay. Of course, the ENB team members were worried about coming to Paris and we were all concerned about putting our colleagues in harm’s way. However, after speaking with our team members and the UN security officials responsible for the event, we all decided that the meeting was far too important and that the terrorists would not deter us in our plans. However, we spent a lot of time in the weeks before the Summit developing emergency response measures and put in place an SMS alert system and emergency plan in the case of troubles. We were very pleased, at the end of the Conference, that we had not needed to use any of our emergency contingencies.
So, during the two weeks of COP 21 our team published daily issues of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin with two to three thousand words a day in English, French, Arabic and Japanese from inside the official sessions. We covered more than two hundred side events from the Africa Pavilion, events on the Lima-Paris Action Agenda and the Rio Conventions Pavilion. Our video teams produced thirty short side-event videos, which were posted directly onto Facebook and viewed more than ten million times. Our community e-mail list, CLIMATE-L, handled more than three million individual emails each day to and from the thirty-one thousand subscribers, serving as the informal information network about what was going on at the Summit.
Paris was an enormous success for me both professionally and personally as a lifelong advocate of climate action. Of course, leading the ENB Team at COP 21 was one of my most treasured experiences in a career providing information to environmental decision-makers. But, politics and bureaucracy aside, it was so great to be part of the climate policy community; an extraordinary group of human beings, outstanding individuals, who brought us to a success in Paris. I’m proud to be one of those small group of people who had been there for the adoption of the UNFCCC at Rio in 1992, survived the long last night in Kyoto at COP 3, felt frustrated in The Hague and devastated in Copenhagen, sensed the re-birth and renewal in Cancún and Durban and anguished over the slow pace of negotiations in Warsaw and Lima. I’m also proud that we captured, particularly in our photos (most of which were shot by the wonderful Kiara Worth, from Cape Town, South Africa) the very human moments inside of the negotiations.
The record we produced, including the insider’s perspective on what happened in the closed-door negotiations, the reports from the myriad of side events, the photos that captured the stress, exhaustion, and the eventual joy, will live on in history. Mounting the effort to capture Paris, providing real-time trusted information during the negotiations and creating this online record of our success was my story in Paris and my contribution towards enabling this Agreement.
May 2018
