[FMAL-10] Aaron Neville's Soulful Christmas
What are they negotiating? Why should we care? What kind of barefoot shoe should I buy before my girlfriend picks them up for me in Vermont? Two of these three questions will be answered before the end of this, Fondue, and Maybe a Lake, written by me, Bernard Soubry. This is your tenth(!) email.
This totally insane set of triple Big Anxious Dog meetings is what’s called an Intersessional, Conferences of the Parties being the sessions. If COPs are the kind of Christmas party that my mom loves to throw, with about a hundred people in a home meant for six and lots of carolling and everyone saying the kinds of things at three in the morning that they’re going to have to live down for the next couple of years, intersessionals are those moments after the party when everyone collapses on the sofa and swears they’re never going to do that again. And then start planning the buffet for next year.
Twelve years ago, the members of the COP—that is, all the parties in the Convention—agreed on a global biodiversity framework with a bunch of targets to drastically slow biodiversity loss. These were called the Aichi Targets, after the city in which they were agreed to. Countries had ten years to change the flow of the river of death we’ve visited on the planet’s ecosystems; ten years, we reasoned, and then we’d reassess.
By 2019, it was pretty clear that absolutely none of the goals was going to be reached. Not even a little. Heck, some of them had actually gone backwards. So the CBD did what you do when you’re losing the match but in charge of the rules, which is: renegotiate the goalposts.
For the past three years, the point has been to try to get a new global biodiversity framework—something 2020-2030. The COP started everything from scratch, built up an open-ended working group, and told them, “get us something good we can sign for 2020.” Thus, the intersessional work.
COPs aren’t the kinds of parties where the hosts are very good at prepping. They’ll set up the house, sure, and when push comes to shove, they’ll get in there and force everybody to have a good time. But the intersessional work of all the substantive bodies is to be the caterers, the stylists, the people who come and clean your house and spruce up your “IT’S CUDDLING SEASON” pillows. (Don’t ask me how to organize a Christmas party; my kind of good time is someone bringing decent whiskey, roasting root vegetables, and seeing how many verses of “Fogarty’s Cove” we can play through.)
The comparison is apt, actually, because the Post-2020 (now post-2022, I guess) GBF isn’t just one thing to negotiate—it’s a bunch of different components according to the agenda item set. Mobilizing funds. Capacity-building and technology transfer. Digital Sequence Information (none of these may make sense to you; by the end of the week, I swear they will.) The punch, roast beef, and small veggie dip in a pumpernickel bread of biodiversity governance.
If you want to have a good COP—a decent party—you need all the components set up. So what these two and a half weeks are about is negotiating text proposals about all of these different subject areas until they are as clean and devoid of open disagreement as they possibly can be, and then sending those off to the COP. And the COP’s job is to untangle the final bits of fighting and sign it all and put the Doobie Brothers on too loud. (This is not a jab at my family. My father would put Aaron Neville on too loud. Now there’s a jab.)
Should all of the preparation not happen, and the guests start to show up with people still in the kitchen, there will still be a party. Probably. But it’ll take a lot longer, and it’ll be really annoying to make everything ready when everyone’s messing around with the living room decorations or trying to play “Piano Man” at the keyboard. It gives you COPs like the climate conference in Madrid, where we went 37 hours over schedule and I had to sleep under a table while reporting.
None of us have slept for more than four hours in three days in this photo.
And at the end of it, will it be a biodiversity governance agreement that works? I mean, this is an open question, and it’s one I’m not asking too loudly so that I can change the tone of this newsletter away from complaint and depression. The last ten years’ targets didn’t work. What makes anybody think that putting the same music on in the same house with the same crappy veggie dip in pumpernickel bread is going to make an even better Christmas party?
Well, we were in a room today for six hours where two out of the ten things on the to-do list got done. Guess we have a week til we find out the answer.
How’s that for a newsletter cliffhanger,
Bernard
PS: I love you, Mom and Dad, and those Christmas parties mean the world to me.