Climate Civics International is supporting progress on core climate resilience goals at COP29, through advocacy, through substantive support to important areas of innovation, and through the People’s Pavilion digital platform.

Our COP Agenda

A safe, resilient, and livable climate future is possible. Shared prosperity, built around innovative industries that enhance climate value, should be a core feature of this better future. Several items on the agenda in Baku hold real potential to move us toward that safer and more livable world.

CCI is focusing on the following, due to their potentially transformational impact: 

1. Civics, or the genius of local understanding
2. Finance reform, innovation, and instrumentation
3. Article 6.8 non-market cooperation and trade
4. The PARIS Principles and efforts toward a global floor price for pollution
5. Food systems that restore nature and improve health and livelihoods
6. Zero harm as the ambition-setting global goal

We must begin to grapple with new evidence that human activity has already warmed the planet by 1.5°C since 1700, before the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. These six areas of work can advance global climate action, improve conditions for people, and set nations on course for successful climate-resilient development, if we act now.

Insights for successful negotiations

Together with The Fletcher School at Tufts University, Climate Civics International convened a series of pre-COP29 Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops, which generated critical insights on getting to a successful outcome in Baku, including:

• The most consistent core insight is the need for negotiations and outcomes that leave behind zero-sum thinking (where if one wins the other loses), to provide multiple co-benefits all around. 
• Carlos Alvarado—former President of the Republic of Costa Rica and a Professor of Practice at The Fletcher School—explored five concepts that support better strategic thinking and better outcomes in multilateral negotiations: Positionality, Empathy, Dualism, History, and Leadership, each of these opening a universe of practical insight about relational dynamics and value-building common ground.
• We heard about the importance of the UAE-Belem Work Programme on Indicators, which starts from 11 overall targets for measuring progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation and has now gathered input on more than 7,000 potential indicators.
• An increasingly clear area of need is for community-level participation in climate-related decision-making. Stakeholder insights on needs, aspirations, practical constraints, and operational capacities, make official choices more relevant, rooted, and replicable, adding efficiency to decision-making processes. A key question is which modalities work best in which circumstances, and how the UNFCCC process can prioritize or facilitate such engagement.

‘Non-market’ multilateral cooperation can mainstream climate action

Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement covers a lot of ground with relatively few words:

Article 6 – (8) Parties recognize the importance of integrated, holistic and balanced non-market approaches being available to Parties to assist in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions, in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, in a coordinated and effective manner, including through, inter alia, mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity-building, as appropriate. These approaches shall aim to: (a) Promote mitigation and adaptation ambition; (b) Enhance public and private sector participation in the implementation of nationally determined contributions; and (c) Enable opportunities for coordination across instruments and relevant institutional arrangements.

CCI co-leads the Climate Value Exchange, with partners, to create opportunities for advancing the many diverse areas of multilateral climate cooperation that can support a mainstream transition to climate-smart trade and finance.

Advancing Good Food Finance

CCI is co-hosting a formal COP29 side event with the FAIRR Initiative, the Good Food Finance Network, and the TAPP Coalition, to explore enabling policies and financial innovations that can make food systems climate-resilient and healthier and more affordable for people around the world.

Past COP reporting

CCI reports year-round on issues that are negotiated and advanced by the UN Climate Change negotiating process. Our reports from past COP annual meetings also provide important historical context to the shape and direction of discussions playing out in Baku.