COP29 and Building a Vision from Below “Z”

Climate activists marching on the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC during “Climate Week” in September 2024 (photo by Sarah Yenesel/EPA, published at featured link).

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

This week the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) begins in Azerbaijan. The COP29 Parties also are now one year into the first “stocktake” of their progress under the Paris Agreement, and Micro-Climate has reached its 10th week, so I’m going to do a small stocktake of purpose here.

In late September, former US Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry gave fossil fuel companies “a letter below Z” for their lack of progress in moving away from fossil fuels (featured link below). The period February 2023-January 2024 was the first to have an average temperature of more than 1.5℃. The outcome of the US election last week is highly likely to remove the US from the Paris Agreement again, slowing US and global progress toward its goals.

Recent reports are raising concerns about the apparent declining capacity of oceans and forests to absorb carbon (pre-print, Guardian-global, Guardian-Finland) and that reducing global temperatures by technical means if they exceed 1.5℃ will be more difficult than expected. In turn, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports that world wildlife populations have declined 73% over the past half century.

In the face of all this, where does archaeology fit? WWF I think said it well, that 

“(t)o maintain a living planet where people and nature thrive, we need action that meets the scale of the challenge…nothing less than a transformation of our food, energy and finance systems.” 

This is the space in which archaeology and heritage should operate: building a vision that history is not about stasis but change, that culture and our senses of ourselves must be part of such transformations. The recent UN Pact for the Future states this should be done; it is up to us to do it.

Featured Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/23/new-york-climate-week-al-gore-john-kerry-condemn-fossil-fuels

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.