COP 21 Day 3

Jessica Timerman, Kayla Walsh and Isabella Soparkar

By being present in Paris during these historic negotiations, we have witnessed government, nongovernmental, civil society, and citizen actors converging to negotiate the future of the planet and its people. Over the course of the past few days, we have gained insight into what it truly means to “negotiate,” coming to understand the multiplicity of the term and the multitude of spaces in which negotiation in its many forms occurs. Negotiating our shared future first involves coming together to cultivate empathy. One event in Paris where this occurred was at the breaking of the fast event on Tuesday.

On December 1, 2015, thousands of people across the world took part in the Fast for the Climate. With many others here at COP21 and across Paris, Forest participated in this fast in solidarity with those most impacted by climate change. After a long day spent at the COP21 negotiations, over 100 civil society members and delegates alike came together at small church in Paris to break the fast with a celebratory feast in recognition of the hopeful aspirations for COP21.

The Fast for the Climate campaign was inspired by Yeb Saño, delegate to the Philippines at the 2013 COP19 negotiations in Warsaw. Hours before the opening statements made by country delegates, the Philippines was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan. In his riveting opening statement, Yeb Saño vowed to fast for the remainder of the COP19 in solidarity with his friends, family, and fellow countrymen who were directly impacted by climate change.

Since that day in 2013, the Fast for the Climate has gained momentum. In 2014, the campaign called upon all people to fast on the first of every month. In 2015, on the road to COP21, the campaign organized a rolling fast assigning a new faster for every day of the year. Over this period of time, Yeb Saño sustained his leadership on climate change. In addition to representing Fast for the Climate as a COP21 delegate, Yeb and many others participated in the People’s Climate Pilgrimage – walking over 900 miles from Rome to Paris.

On the day of the fast, Forest spoke to fasters and asked the following question: Why do you fast? While many shared powerful and compelling stories, perhaps most interesting where subsequent discussions that delved into how different individuals approached the fast itself. For some, fasting was a way for them to feel the hunger those most impacted by climate change feel every day. Others embarked on their fast as a spiritual journey often times linked to various faith perspectives that consider fasting a time of prayer and closeness to God. And there were some that simply used the fast as a form of action to raise awareness for the necessity to address climate change.

Whether you identified with only one, none, or perhaps all of these interpretations of the fast, the underlying theme of these actions was one of collaboration and coalition building. The fasters expressed a deep sense of empathy – the ability to see and to feel the world through another’s perspective and use this connection to co-create positive solutions to address climate change.

We cannot help but recall a statement made by Macalester’s President Rosenberg in his recent interview with WCCO-TV: “If you were to look at our world right now and say what’s the problem, it’s hard to boil it down to one thing but I think you could make a pretty good case that an absence of empathy is at least one of the big problems we face.” In the case of climate change these words ring true.

While this analysis focuses on the Fast for the Climate, this movement is analogous to the approach necessary to catalyze the negotiations to promote a successful agreement. The Fast for the Climate has set a precedent for our world leaders. Will they follow?

In other news, students outside the conference attended the Tara Schooner Pavilion situated on the banks of the Seine. This venue includes both tours of the Tara (a ship built and operated by a French non-profit for high-level scientific research missions) and a conference room that is focused on oceans and small island states.

After exiting the metro, we walked directly into a small conference room (no more than 30 people) to observe a panel discussion on sustainable oceanic development projects. This panel included the President of Palau, Tommy Remengesau. Every panelist spoke of the need for reciprocity in development strategies, highlighting the fact that constituents must be endowed equal opportunity to engage with projects aimed to benefit their communities. An important insight expressed at this event is that the most vulnerable already know the best ways to help themselves.

With the spirit of reciprocity in mind, how might we understand our ability to directly engage with the President of Palau, and be corralled aside as Francois Hollande explored the Climate Generations civil society space? Imagine the security if President Obama was in attendance at this panel discussions and how the access and dynamics of the event might be altered. Reciprocity, one of the principal themes we heard at the Tara event, clearly does not exist in the formal negotiations. Therefore, can we ever expect a sense of reciprocity to exist in the outcome of the negotiations if they only replicate existing power dynamics? Further, what might the organizers of the official negotiations learn from the organizing and collaboration present among civil society here in Paris?

One sign of hope for equalizing the playing field for negotiations, from what we have seen, is that the act of negotiation appears far from confined to the official venue alone. The simple act of attracting passionate people to the same place united around a common purpose stimulates the connection necessary to build robust new collaborations. In this way, COP21 transforms Paris into a magnet for innovation, and a catalyst capable of sparking new connections.

What has been clear here in Paris is that the real negotiations occur both within and well beyond the walls of the official conference site. While national delegates banter over semantics within the walls of the negotiating rooms as they hammer out the framework of the new Paris agreement, far more are having conversations and forming connections in far less “official” spaces—in the coffee line, on the train, walking through the hallways. These mundane spaces transform into sites of deliberation.

It’s in these informal, unassuming, commonplace spaces that true collaboration becomes possible, strong alliances are formed, the capacity is built to sustain solutions. For us, it has been humbling to gain an unprecedented level of access into these negotiations, and to realize that those in the official conference spaces are far from the only ones who are negotiating the world’s future.