Back in early November, I received an email invitation out of the blue from two organizations called C40 Cities and the ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, asking if I wanted to join the LGMA Constituency at COP28 and attend a Local Climate Action Summit as part of COP28. It was so out of the blue that I joked to my EA about it – could you imagine going to Dubai? – and dismissed the invitation pretty quickly.

However, this was followed by an invitation to attend a webinar put together by the ICLEI to learn about the LGMA, the LCAS program, and the role of Local Governments in the UNFCCC process. Hardly a lark, this was an opportunity for our small community to represent British Columbia local governments at an international table, and an opportunity for City Staff to connect with and learn from their cohort around the world. Once I learned that New Westminster’s participation (along with that of ~100 other local governments from around the world) would be sponsored by the C40 Cities Leadership Group (meaning it would not cost the City for me and city staff to participate), I started conversations with City Staff that led us to decide it was a good opportunity for the City, and something we should participate in.

As with most of what I do in this job, I want to use this blog to write about the job, and to open up for folks a bit of how government works and the things local government can and does achieve. In this case, I also got a little glimpse into how International government works, and it was not all that inspiring, but I’m already getting ahead of myself. COP28 occurred in the first week of December, and I finally had a bit of downtime over the Christmas Break to write about this, and that means it went long. So this quick report-out has turned into a series of blog posts about the COP28 experience: The inspiring part (local governments kicking ass!), the less inspiring (national governments writ large), and the terrifying (the neo-colonial solution space).

The 28th Conference of the Parties was a lot of different things, all happening at the same time in the same place. Central to it is the meeting of National Governments from around the world under the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process. This part is a bit obscure to most people in its function, but is also the source of all of the headlines. As a Canadian, and a designated member of the LGMA (Local Government Municipal Authority) Constituency to the UNFCCC process, I was able to attend briefings by the Canadian negotiating team, and was able to take part in the Ministerial Meeting on Urbanization & Climate Change which was the LGMA contribution to the negotiations (more on that later).

COP28 is also the world’s biggest professional conference of the world’s leaders in addressing climate action, including national and subnational government representatives and people in the public service, private industry, and the non-profit realm who do this work professionally. That is a huge breadth of work, and the conference program is huge. At times I attended events along with a City staff member; at times they had parallel programs and interests that better aligned with their work, so we went separate ways to cover more ground. There were scores of parallel conference streams that attendees could move between, which requires a bit of a discussion of the geography of COP28.

The main conference was held at “Expo City”, which was the site of the 2020 World Exposition in Dubai. This includes one of the largest Convention Centre sites in the world, surrounded by acres of buildings and pavilions like you would expect to see at a World Exposition. To put in a Vancouver perspective, imagine if Expo 86 was still set up and spread across all of False Creek, with a convention centre twice the size of the Vancouver Convention Centre in the middle of it.

This site was divided in to two parts. The “Blue Zone” required UNFCCC accreditation, and was quite secure (metal detectors, ID verification, etc.), and the “Green Zone” that was open to the public. The Blue Zone is where all of the national and theme pavilions were and where the main conference Plenary is held. Walking around the Blue Zone (as we did a lot to get to different talks) felt a bit like walking around a big University Campus, with the surreal United Nations feel – you might walk past the President of France and his entourage, physically bump into Mark Carney as you are rushing around a corner, or see someone you know from SFU searching for the same pavilion as you (all three of these literally happened to me one day, within an hour of each other). And though it was a “secure” area, it was also the site of various protests, as various coalitions of groups pushed the assembled leaders for more climate action, for climate justice, and the end of fossil fuel extraction.

The Green zone was less busy, but was similar in layout. This is where you found a strange amalgam of non-profits, activist groups, and private industry interests set up to talk about and hawk their wares. There was a significant public participation component, lots of educations resources, and much better food offerings than within the Blue Zone.

Finally, COP28 is also a large trade show, and I am going to lump together both large non-profit and social enterprise organizations and the corporate sector here in the spirit of brevity. Several pavilions at the main conference were set up in themes, such as “Empowering the Energy Transition” or “Multilevel Action and Urbanization”, and you will have GE selling wind turbines, major European Capital Funds looking to invest in development of new technologies, Social Enterprises seeking funding for new work in the developing world, and everything in between. I didn’t spend as much time in these spaces, but there is no doubt in looking at the scale of these displays that “Climate Action” is big business.

As COP28 was so big, there were also some parallel programs happening at other sites in the city, and the use of Metro Transit was free to all accredited COP28 attendees. Most LCAS participants were housed in a hotel about an hour from EXPO City by train, and I could go off on another entire blog about the speed, headway, cleanliness, and crowdedness, of Dubai Metro, but suffice to say most of what I saw of Dubai proper was seen at 70kkm/h out the window of a light rail train while straphanging with COP28 participants from around the world and the million young guest workers who keep UAE running.

And with that stage set, my next post will cover the special role of local governments at COP28.