Long Story Short

The United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP is an imperfect forum for achieving progress on climate change. The discourse that unfolds there is dominated by the global north. Any action agreed upon is nonbinding. It’s heavily attended — and influenced — by lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. It may not be the forum we need, but it’s the forum we have, Kumi Naidoo, a climate activist and the former executive director of Greenpeace International, told Devex on the most recent episode of our Climate+ podcast. “The way I see COP is it's about getting the best out of the really bad system,” he said. COP’s strength lies in its power to shape the narrative around climate change, which up until this point has failed to engage both citizens and governments on the scale that it needs to. According to Naidoo, the climate movement needs to go beyond data and facts in its messaging — it needs to appeal to emotions, too. Breaking climate out of its silo and recognizing its interconnectedness with human