Don’t Look Up

Deniz Konuralp, Head of our Sustainability Practice, looks at the Bonn process in the run-up to COP31 and why both are still worth our time and effort

In Adam McKay’s 2021 satirical film Don’t Look Up, two scientists discover that a comet will wipe out life on Earth. As the inevitable American 24-hour news cycle kicks in, they appear on breakfast TV to sound their warning. The hapless scientists are advised by their media handlers to ‘make a story out of it’ and not complicate the message with ‘boring science’.

As an allegory for climate change, the film is darkly funny about humanity’s inability to grasp the facts around its imminent destruction. And it provides some useful ideas to frame what we’re living through.

The five stages of grief

I like to break our era into understandable chunks by applying the five stages of grief. First comes denial; the current US administration has not been able to move past this. Next up is anger at the developed world for kicking the can down the road and refusing to compel fossil fuel companies to strand assets and then comes the bargaining and depression. At some distant future, finally, comes acceptance.

More than a decade on from the Paris Climate Agreement, it strikes me that we’re still at the bargaining stage of our grief. The international climate process that gives rise this year to the 31st Conference of the Parties resulting in a joint Turk-Aussie collaboration in Antalya. The Turks will host the event, giving their tourism and self-esteem an overdue boost, while the Australians, as ‘President of Negotiations’ get to do most of the actual work, ensuring their ‘Pacific Priorities’ are attended to.

The COP cycle is immensely technical, full of acronyms, subsidiary bodies, work programmes, roadmaps, dialogues, indicators and negotiated distinctions that make perfect sense to insiders and very little sense to almost everyone else. COP resembles a travelling circus, moving between Bonn and successive host cities, issuing announcements that are solemnly welcomed and then completely ignored by democratic leaders facing more immediate incentives (like being re-elected).

The finance debate is equally dispiriting. A just transition shouldn’t mean asking poorer countries to take on yet more debt to address a crisis they did little to create; much more of this support should come through grants and debt relief. In authoritarian systems, weak accountability also creates the risk that borrowed funds are redirected towards political allies or private fortunes. But whatever the political system, loading already indebted countries with further liabilities does little to protect poorer people today or serve the interests of those not yet born.

All is not lost

The past decade has not been entirely wasted: renewable technologies have expanded; solar and wind costs have fallen so quickly that clean technology is now mainstream. But global emissions suggest that we’ve already probably hit 1.5 degrees.

The scale of that task is difficult to communicate. During COVID, global carbon emissions fell by about 5.4%. That was the largest modern annual decline, caused by grounded aircraft, empty roads, closed workplaces and restrictions on ordinary life. Just to give you an idea of scale, the world would have to emit about 7% less each year from now on to hit that Paris target.  Between the pandemic-induced low of 2020 and 2025, global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions increased by almost 10%, reaching a new annual high of around 38.1 billion tonnes.

It’s against this backdrop that the COP31 Presidency is presenting Antalya as an implementation COP centred on electrification, green industrialisation, circularity, resilient cities and finance reaching projects on the ground.  There are valid reasons for scepticism. The implementation landscape is already crowded, with an Action Agenda, a Global Implementation Accelerator, the Belém Mission 1.5 and further finance mechanisms all competing for political attention.

There are also genuine contradictions. Electrification is being presented as COP31’s flagship theme, yet as Greenpeace Turkey remarked at Bonn last week, electrifying is not a solution if the electricity continues to be generated from coal, oil and gas. And clean electricity targets are meaningless in grids not designed to handle renewable energy, lack the storage, distribution, affordable access and the infrastructure required to use power where and when it is needed. I digress. Taking shots at the UN or COPs is like shooting fish in a barrel. So, what’s the point, I hear you ask?

This is all we have, for now

These meetings still matter, partly because they preserve the possibility of collaboration. The climate process creates common definitions, reporting systems, financial mechanisms, technical standards and relationships among governments, cities, companies, scientists and civil society. Much of this is painfully slow and almost invisible until a political moment arrives in which those structures can suddenly be mobilised.

We know that such cooperation is possible. Under the Montreal Protocol, governments agreed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances. Nearly 99% of the controlled chemicals have since been eliminated, and the ozone layer is on a path towards recovery. This problem was narrower than climate change: the industries involved were fewer and alternatives were easier to identify. But the lesson remains important: science and international cooperation can work together when governments accept the urgency and create enforceable obligations.

Smaller initiatives matter too. A city changes its procurement rules and creates markets for lower-carbon construction. A region uses carbon-pricing revenue to fund electrification. A development bank reduces the risk of an industrial project. A court halts a coal expansion. A group of countries unable to secure consensus at COP meets elsewhere, as happened in Santa Marta, and begins building practical fossil fuel transition roadmaps. None of these actions is sufficient. Together, they establish precedents, shift expectations and create the machinery through which larger change becomes possible.

Perhaps that is the most honest argument for continuing. The COP process is not moving at the speed demanded by the science. It is frequently performative, politically constrained and maddeningly technical. But abandoning it would not make national governments more ambitious, finance more equitable or fossil-fuel interests less powerful. It would remove one of the few forums in which nearly every country is required to confront the same evidence and negotiate within a common framework.

We soldier on, not because the process has proved adequate, but because collaboration remains the only plausible route through a crisis that no country can solve alone. The negotiations preserve institutions, knowledge and channels of cooperation that may seem insufficient today but could become indispensable when political urgency finally catches up with physical reality. The point is not that another declaration will save us. It is that, when the final acceptance stage of grief manifests and we’re ready to act at the necessary scale, some of the structures we’ll need will exist.

Hopefully we will look up at some point, and, when we do, we’ll be ready.