 Let me welcome everyone to our briefing today. What's on the table for the negotiations? And this is the second briefing of our three-part series, What Congress Needs to Know About COP28. I'm Dan Bersett, I'm the President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and thank you very much for joining us today. Mega thanks to our friends in Representative Tonko's office and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for hosting us today and helping us get this great room. Before we turn to our panelists, I'd like to say a few things about EESI. Our work dates back 40 years ago. 40 years ago, a bipartisan group of members of Congress got together and decided that there needed to be an organization to provide educational resources to their fellow members and especially their staff about environmental and energy topics. And over time, that broadened to be climate change topics. So today, we do things like this. We do briefings. We do articles. We do podcasts. We do newsletters. And the whole idea is to help provide nonpartisan science-based information to congressional staff and their bosses about climate change topics. We also have some expertise helping utilities in rural areas access Department of Agriculture resources, especially the Rural Energy Savings Program. And so that's something that we've been working on for a little bit more than a decade as well. But on Capitol Hill, this is what we're known for, bringing together tremendous panels of experts to share information about what they know and what's sort of coming up or happening in climate policy. This is just one of our briefings. We have like two dozen briefings or so this year. This is part of a series. We also did a series a little bit earlier this year about the Farm Bill. At some point, there'll be a Farm Bill. And when that happens, there are six briefings ready to go. You can go back on our website, www.esa.org, and check them out. We covered rural development, conservation, forestry, research and development, economic environmental win-wins, and process. And we had a really tremendous group of speakers across those six briefings talking to us and our audiences about how the Farm Bill works, how it might work this year, what might make this Farm Bill different from previous Farm Bills. We also started a new series back in September called IIJ and IRA Progress Report. This one was about, we had 12, no, excuse me, we had nine panelists talking about 12 tax incentives across the entire spectrum of clean energy and climate that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act when it was enacted back in August 2022. That started on September 28th, and we'll be doing that at least once every six months or so for the foreseeable future. That's a lot, and I don't expect everyone to just written all that down, so don't worry, you can go to our website, www.esa.org, and check it out. The best way to keep up with everything that we're up to is by subscribing to our bi-weekly newsletter, that's called Climate Change Solutions. And during COP 28, we will have a special daily newsletter to help congressional staff keep up with the proceedings and the negotiations from Dubai. That's called the COP Dispatch, and at some point there'll be a letter, a sign-in sheet on a clipboard going around if you wanna sign up for that. I encourage you to do that. You know, our goal is to be there when your bosses ask you a tough question on a Thursday afternoon. You know, hey, what's this COP thing? Tell me about this. What's loss and damage? What is the role of a multilateral development bank in international climate finance? These are tough questions for congressional staff to be asked out of the blue, and so the whole purpose of what we're trying to do here is to give you that information, to give you those resources before your bosses ask that tough question. And that requires us to be timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. There will be a lot happening at COP, and it's way more than what anyone can do on their own to stay up with it, and we understand that, and so I hope you'll use us as a resource as we get going. Like I just said, there's a lot that's gonna be happening with COP, and our expert speakers today will talk to us a little bit more about that. There'll be thousands of events. There'll be intense and high-stakes negotiations on issues that will have consequences for everyone here in the United States and abroad. International Climate Finance and Multilateral Development Banks, that'll be something that will be discussed a lot. The Global Stock Take, we have a briefing about that in a few weeks. I encourage you to take a look at that. But today we're not gonna be focusing as much on the Global Stock Take or International Climate Finance. We'll be talking about those things in the context of the process, of the negotiations themselves, what's on the table, what do we expect to be happening, and when, who will be part of it, what are some possible outcomes, and what are some potential pathways for potential congressional action. Our next slide shows a survey. We often talk about this at the end of the briefing, but wanted to just mention it today. As you're talking, whether you're in our in-person audience or our robust online audience today, if you're liking what you're hearing or if you have suggestions for how we can improve, I hope you'll take a moment and fill out our survey. We actually read every response and take everything very seriously. And with that, I am going to introduce our congressional speaker for the day. We're very, very fortunate to have Representative Nanette Diaz-Barrigan join us today via pre-recorded video remarks. Representative Barrigan was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2016, becoming the first Latina ever to represent California's 44th congressional district. She is chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a member of the Progressive Caucus. She serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its subcommittees on health and energy, climate, and grid security. In 2019, she became the first Latina in 10 years to hold a seat on this prestigious committee and only the second Latina ever to do so. Representative Barrigan serves as a voice for the communities that have been on the front lines of the negative health impacts associated with climate change and environmental justice. My friend, Dan O'Brien, will get the video up and running and we'll hear what she has to say. Thanks. Thank you to EESI for the opportunity to briefly speak with you this afternoon as we prepare for COP28. Last year, I had the honor of attending the COP27 conference in Egypt with then Speaker Nancy Pelosi and over a dozen of my Democratic colleagues. While in Egypt, we took the opportunity to highlight the work done by Democrats in Congress to pass the Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in our country's history. We were able to meet with leaders of other countries and affirm our continued commitment to ambitious climate action. Now, after a summer of record heat waves, Canadian wildfire smoke that impacted a large part of the East Coast and extreme floods, the stakes could not be higher for COP28 in Dubai. This is a chance to further enhance and speed up the global commitments to a clean energy future. We are on the right path. The clean energy transition is underway. This year, we expect $1.7 trillion worldwide to be invested in clean energy technologies compared to $1 trillion in fossil fuels. However, we need to rapidly increase the pace and the scale of action to address the worst impacts of climate change. We must engage with countries around the world to build momentum for bold climate action globally. Direct face-to-face conversations are critical to that momentum. COP28 will be an opportunity to renew our commitment, to meet and exceed America's climate targets. Members of Congress and the Biden administration must continue to lead here at home to strengthen our hand on the global stage. Congress has a role to play in these conversations on how countries across the globe can work together to phase out fossil fuels, increase the pace of climate action across governments and businesses, provide climate finance for developing countries to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, protect our global food system and reduce its carbon footprint, hold all governments accountable to their previous climate commitments and more. We see a huge movement of action to protect and defend our climate in our communities, our states, our country and across the world. This challenge now is to bring all of this action together to form a united response from our governments to achieve the progress we need. Congress needs to keep up the pace of climate action at home and continue to work alongside the Biden administration and our global partners to advance a sustainable future for all. I'm committed to this work and we need every one of you as partners in our global clean energy movement. Thank you. Thank you, Dano. And thank you to Representative Bergon for joining us today and sharing your remarks. It was very, very nice of you to do that and thanks to your great staff who helped make that possible. The last thing I wanna mention is that we have four tremendous panelists and we have a great audience and when those two things come together, some people have questions and follow up inquiries and things and so we'll have a question and answer period after our fourth presenter today. If you're in our in-person audience, we'll have a microphone. If you're in our online audience, you can still ask us a question and you can do that in one of two ways. One is by sending us an email and the email address to use is ask. That's ASK at ESI.org or you can follow us on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and we're known as ESI or at ESI online and you can send us a question that way. This is the third, I think, of our what's on the table for the negotiations briefings and the constant in all those briefings are me and Anna and Omri and Dano but Tracy Bogg is also a constant and she is our first panelist today. Tracy is a law professor who serves as the co-focal point of the research and independent NGO constituency with Ringo to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Tracy is a lecturer at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught and published on climate change, international environmental law and human rights and healthcare and environmental health law since 1996. Tracy, it's always a delight to see you. I look forward to your presentation. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. So yes, I'm either a frequent flyer or a bad penny, something like that. And thank goodness that Dan speaks as quickly as he does because it makes me look slow as molasses. I'm a country hick from the great state of the People's Republic of Vermont. So shout out to Peter and Bernie and my favorite Becca who I helped to elect and whose wife was one of my teaching assistants at the law school. I'm so happily represented. Tonight though, or today, you can tell I was at the pre-cop last week in Abu Dhabi. So actually my body still, and my mouth still thinks it's tonight. I get to tell you, oops, I guess I need to turn some things, there we go. I get to tell you about COP28, how it's structured, how you can engage the presidency in particular, the COP28 presidency and UAE and what they are hoping to achieve here. And then I'll pass the mic and we'll get to the real information, the nitty gritty. So I've peppered the presentation with a number of photos of actually Expo City because I had an opportunity to give a lecture there last week. It's gorgeous and it's going to be very comfortable as well as big. Right, okay, so first of all, you can't really see this but I tried to bold COP28 because we're all gonna say COP28. But the first thing, if there's several takeaways, the first is that it's not just COP, so COP stands for Conference of Parties, 28th means it's the 28th of them. And that's a Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention, which is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we will now call the UNFCCC going forward, sorry. And there are two other major COPs going on at the same time, why you ask? Because there are two other treaties that parties have ratified. So there is the Kyoto Protocol, which is a treaty that we say is under the umbrella of the UNFCCC and that meeting is called the CMP. Just keep that, you don't need to know what it stands for, but the peace protocol. And then the third major body is the CMA. And did I put the numbers? Yeah, I did put the numbers for you. So you can see that it's only the fifth meeting of the Paris Agreement COP because the Paris Agreement is new. The thing they have in common is that the two weeks of a COP are very different. The first week is what I think of as the technical meeting. It's actually my favorite part because I'm a climate geek, because I'm a professor. So what's gonna happen? One, all the planetary bodies are gonna open on November 30th and run for the first week. But the two, the real work is gonna be done with what we call the subsidiary bodies. There's one that's on implementation, SBI, and one that's on science and technical advice. So think about right making policy here. You use committees to do that because the cops are quasi-legislative bodies. What they're doing each year is negotiating hard over the language of decision texts so that parties understand what they're continuing and continually refined responsibilities are under each of these treaties. So at the SBs, after we have the opening and then we're going to start the negotiations at the SB level, there is going to be a presidency event if we bump down to the fourth bullet. And that is what we call an HLS or a high level segment. This year, our UAE hosts have rebranded it as the, I always get it wrong, they call it WAKAS, which I start singing the 2010 COP song every time I hear that. So that's the World Climate Action Summit. And that's going to be for two days, December 1 and 2, just happens to be the UAE's July 4th, so their national holiday. So it's a big opportunity to celebrate what they're doing in the region, which is one of the reasons that they're taking on, I think, this COP hosting, but it will have the equivalent of John Kerry or I don't know if Biden will come. Certainly it's the heads of states and heads of government are active in this. Then there's a variety of mandated events and workshops. I'll just leave that for you and I'm happy to answer questions. There's going to be a number of high level events with ministers, so that really is the Kerry level. And it could be other agencies or departments. And then critically, and what we didn't see happen so well at some recent prior cops, is they close because it's kind of like, I don't know if there's a crossover period between bills here, I should know that, right? That was probably in civics at some point. But in many, certainly in our Vermont legislature, we have a day that's a drop dead day that they need to go to the other chamber. And so in a similar way, the SB decisions that they've been drafting recommended texts for the COP, the CMP and the CMA to deliberate on and accept by consensus, which means not no, doesn't mean unanimity. So their closing day is December 6th. Hopefully. What we've had in the past is because of the polarization that we see, getting to not know can be really challenging. And so most recently, we had a number of subsidiary body items not closed and then be turfed up. So you can imagine that, right? I don't have to labor that more. Some detailed committee decision being turfed up to the Senate or the House, it just wouldn't be pretty, I imagine. It's not pretty at a cop. So the second week is what many folks come in for because this is the political week. This is when high level leaders are expanding bandwidth. Here, the red lines maybe become orangish or yellow where everybody's seeking to converge on what are, I should be clear, on average, 20 agenda items per body. So that's either 20 times three at the cop level. You add two more subsidiary bodies. That's 20 times five. It's a lot of very specific issues with very carefully negotiated language about what are continuing responsibilities on those issues. There'll be a resumed, oh, if you see the dates, December 7th is a rest day. In the old days, they used to call it the hygiene day, which I had the sense that we took baths that day, but actually the ideas we actually sleep or the parties sleep. But they actually meet that day too. So I won't go on, but we officially reopen on the 8th and then close on the 12th. I think the answer to that is inshallah. I haven't been to a cop that's closed on time. I think Charm takes the, right? I think it's the longest going over time, the last one. So I know I am booked through December 14th. And so if any of you are in charge of having your folks there, I would think about extending this day. Okay, so the UAE presidency, certainly, first of all, on the left you'll see are its thematic days. There's a number of issues there like oceans or health that are not on the negotiation agenda. So these will be like conference kind of panels with experts who will be talking about these issues. But even though these panels may take place in the blue zone where the negotiations take place, they actually won't be on the negotiation agenda. This can be an opportunity to tee up issues that some parties want to get on the negotiation agenda. And so you'll see some interplay over the years, but that is a long horizon to see. I wanted to tee up a couple of things about the COP28 presidency. I have the good fortune to be able to interact with them as the Ringo constituency focal point. And I can tell you that they are very, very focused on being the COP that actually really kicks in implementation of the Paris Agreement. And the Paris Agreement, as you know, was adopted in what, 2021, entered into force very quickly in 2022 in Marrakesh or right before Marrakesh. So you could say it's been a while and we should, wait, I have that wrong, I have the dates wrong. I'm sorry, I'm doing COP21 and COP22. So 2015 and 2016, apologies. So it has been a while. When I started to do the math to this year, I was like, ooh. So that's a big implementation. It sounds like it's nitty gritty, but it's a real sea change in how the actors who come and represent their countries act. The second is the global stock take. That's the GST on the screen and it's the first one. And I know Lynn's gonna talk about it and I can see in managing my own time, I'm down to my last three minutes. And so I won't go into it, suffice to say though, anytime you do things the first time, I'm sure this happens in your work here, it's a bigger lift. Fundamentally, the GST is taking a comprehensive collective review of progress to date on the article two goals or aims of the Paris Agreement. Did we stay below 1.5, the pledges that were made? That one's easy, no. Are we achieving sufficient adaptation? I think that's easy too, no. And then the third one is about finance and financial flows. The short answer is that there's been a two-year process going on of collecting this information from well-known sources within the UNFCCC and the IPCC process. But we're now in a political phase where these findings, if you want to Google it, you can find them. These draft findings are now being negotiated for what will be in a decision text that will one, admit what we have achieved, well, we start with glass half full and two, what we massively haven't achieved. And then the third piece of it, or really the political piece of it, is taking that information and countries under this article of the Paris Agreement have said when they revise their NDCs, they will take those findings into account because that's a whole idea. It's a stock take. And it's part of what we call the accountability mechanism. So yeah, I think the other piece that I'd like to leave you with is that the UAE is very interested in being coming even more of a major diplomatic force, not only in the region, they're the little brother or the younger cousin of the Saudis in that region. And that's a big part of what they're doing. So they're looking for ways to broker convergence on many of these issues. So the thematic days support that. They've been very focused on holding ministerials, well-timed, we're on the same page. And they really have been, so at the pre-cop we had several ministerials. There was a climate and development ministerial. They've really been focusing at that level so that when we kick off the first opening plenary on November 30th, there is already some agreement about what we're going to achieve by the end of this. Lots of declarations, we can come back to that later. These are the key issues I mentioned global stock take already, loss in damage, which Soha will talk about in more detail. Climate finance, you probably know or you've heard that the US under Obama and with Secretary of State Clinton in the room promised a long time ago to that the developed world would produce $100 billion a year in climate finance every year. The date for that starting was 2020. The developed world has yet to achieve that. Whether measured by OECD data in their reports or in shadow reports by Oxfam or India. So that is a big item. If that is not closed right now at the Berlin-Petersburg Climate Dialogue and last week in the pre-cop, it's like we're almost there. We're almost there. Yeah, we get all these reports. If that's not closed on the first day, I don't think we're going to open in the way that our hosts hope we will. Adaptation, the only thing I, thank you, I'll stop. The bottom line is I want you all to know that when the UNFCCC was started, adaptation was a very low priority issue in part because mitigation was the game. In the Paris Agreement, it's got its own provision. It's equal in the GCF financing. And so that is always on the table. Great, I will pass the baton to my friend Lynn. Oh, no, beforehand. Back to you. Okay, ready? That was great, Tracy. Thank you so much. It's a ton to ask one person to go over and do that layout, but it was really great. There's a lot here. And in addition to the briefing we have today, we also had one two weeks ago that was specifically looking at climate finance, some really, really tremendous panelists with deep experience in that issue. All of our briefings are available online via livecast and archived webcast. So if you want to go back and watch the one, I highly recommend that. And then we'll come back in a few weeks. This one will be online only because most of us will be en route to Dubai, but we'll have a briefing specifically about the global stock take. And so that'll be a resource coming up. And we'll have coverage on these issues every day in our daily newsletter COP 28 dispatch. So I encourage everyone to sign up for that. And if you're a staff or an intern in the room, we'll have staff only resources as well over the course of the entire set of negotiations as well. So you don't have to remember everything that Tracy just said, because we also have Lynn's on Ryan coming up, but we have a lot of different resources to cover this issue, to cover all of these issues. That brings us to our second panelist today, Lynn Wagner. Lynn is the Senior Director of the Tracking Progress Program at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, that's IISD. In this role, Lynn oversees projects that seek to support sustainable development goal implementation. Lynn began working with IISD in 1994 as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and she continues to observe and analyze multilateral environmental negotiations with IISD's flagship publication. Lynn, welcome to the briefing today. I think this is you? No, next one. There we go. All right, thank you, Lynn. Thank you. Yes, so thank you for inviting me to be here, and good luck making sense of what happens during those two weeks in COP. I think Tracy's presentation was maybe the clearest I've heard on how this all works, and she teed my presentation up really well, because I will be talking about what are some of the discussions expected to happen at COP. So I'll be going a little bit more into depth on what her last slide was. I've divided what I'm gonna talk about into official COP 28 agenda items. My next slide and second slide is on COP Presidency objectives, because you'll be hearing about both. Sometimes the COP 28 or the COP Presidency objectives are kind of that shiny thing that the media globs onto. It's a lot easier to explain. It's quickly negotiated during those two weeks, and so you'll be wondering why we didn't tell you there was gonna be a declaration on health or a declaration on food security, but those are not part of the official agenda items. Both of them have some status, presumably adopted by the plenary at the end, but the official agenda items are embedded in work programs under the COP. They've had two years of workshops leading to it, so it has a different status, and it's probably the agreements will be embedded in something that'll carry on much more robustly than what comes out of that cover decision, what the COP Presidency is able to get the negotiators to adopt. So the official agenda items that I'm gonna talk about, as Tracy said, there'll probably be 60 or more decisions, so there's a whole lot going on, but the global stocktake really is the centerpiece for this COP, we've already mentioned it. It's the first one, so they're kind of making up how this works, but the Paris Agreement said there should be a global stocktake every five years. So this one's the first one, expect this to happen in five years, expect a lot of thinking after this one, what went wrong, what went right, how should we do this in the future? So there's been a technical dialogue for the last two years, lots of submissions collected, there's a, I don't have the link to it, but there is an online source where you can type in ideas and it will search through every submission and tell you what people have submitted on that topic. The US State Department's Chief Scientist for Climate Change has served as the co-facilitator during this two-year technical dialogue. So the US has been very involved in it, although it's been more of a collective learning exercise and they haven't gotten to the actual negotiations. Although at the SBs in June, and then there was a workshop in October leading into Dubai where it's very clear where the fault lines will be. The developing countries really want to look back at what hasn't happened pre-2020, who's responsible for climate change, who should take the lead. The developed countries haven't kept their commitment to provide 100 billion US dollars per year starting in 2020. That is a real sticking point in the negotiations that the developed countries haven't kept their promise. And so the developing countries don't let the developed countries forget this. The latest draft for what they'll be discussing in Dubai looks at what they call backward-looking sections and forward-looking sections. So the backward-looking section is on the responsibility, what the promises were supposed to be, what did or didn't happen. And then the forward-looking sections are the ones that look at what is the pathway, what have we learned, what is the pathway, what can we do moving forward? And so what should we think about including in our next nationally determined contribution, our next NDC, which is the whole point of the global stock take. There is a section right now on financial flows or finance, developing countries really want it to be focused on finance really short, which really means development assistance. The US and some other developed countries want to focus on financial flows. And so they want to talk about what private sector inputs need to be, all the finance that needs to go into financing action on climate change. And so that'll be a big debate. The global goal on adaptation, as Tracy said, it's in the Paris Agreement. There's a goal that says parties should enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change. But what does this mean? How do we operationalize it? So it's a counterpart to the temperature goal of trying to keep global temperature well below two degrees Celsius and striving for the 1.5. But so with the global goal on adaptation, the goal is there, but what does it mean? So there's been a two year process leading to COP 28, trying to identify what could be done to figure out how to measure it, what the timeframe should be, who's setting the indicators and targets. Adaptation is a very context specific. So how can you have a global set of indicators for this? But how do you have a global treaty without having globally agreed indicators? So these are the types of discussions that are going into that part of the discussion. Also, how do you link the global goal on adaptation to the future global stock take reviews? How does this whole system work? The mitigation work program was adopted what was it, a few years ago. So right now, every year there are two global dialogue and investment focused events. So these are more kind of global learning events on the side of the SBs. And then there was a workshop between June and now bringing together private sector governments, trying to learn about particular sectors. What are the objectives, the obstacles? So they've had in 2023, two dialogues focused on accelerating just energy transition. The most recent one focused on just energy transition in the transport sector. So trying to get it a little more specific, bringing together the delegates to learn really more about what it takes to really mitigate emissions. An additional issue that might come up under the mitigation work program, it might come up under the global stock take or it might come up under the cover decisions is the question that Tracy alluded to about phasing out fossil fuels. Is there a phase down? Is it that we're looking at phasing out unabated fossil fuels? Is there gonna be a reference specifically to coal? So these are kind of taking together some things that have been agreed before, some things that haven't been. And where this type of phrase ends up will matter if it ends up in the cover decision that the UAE will promote. It won't really have a body that it works in if it comes into the global stock take or in the mitigation work program and it'll have more status and be linked to those types of activities. So then the next item they wanna talk about is the new collective quantified goal on climate finance. So the Paris Agreement called for the negotiation and development of this new goal before 2025. So the objective is next year at the next COP to have concluded this negotiation. So right now you aren't gonna get news about a decision at the end point on what this new goal is. Or it's not likely that you will negotiators feel all available time and space and they still have a whole another year to go on this. And so right now they've been holding workshops essentially on this issue, looking at different issues like what should the timeframe for this new goal be? Should it be five year timeframe? Should it be linked to the net zero objectives that have a 2050 timeframe? Should there be qualitative and quantitative elements in measuring finance? Or is it just straight up finance? Again, the discussion about is it financial flows? Is it everything? Which is how the US interpreted the original 100 billion by 2020? Or is it just tied to development assistance from developed countries to developing countries? So there's a whole discussion in workshop series on all of these issues that'll continue. And might make a few headlines, but don't expect an outcome in December. Loss and damage, luckily my colleague will be talking about that next. So I can jump on to the COP presidency's action agenda just briefly. As I mentioned, lately the COP presidency comes to the COP with their agenda. They have kind of shopped around essentially a draft to try to get the parties to agree to, usually the covered decision is kind of a decision that sits really kind of on the cover of that whole stack of decisions. And it's supposed to introduce to maybe highlight a few things. Depending on the COP presidency and the willingness of all the parties, it's gotten a little bit more substantive in the last few years. And so that's why you might hear about discussion about whether to refer to unabated fossil fuels, phased down, elimination of coal. That might be in the context of this covered decision that the UAE will be shopping around. The UAE is also interested in what they call fixing climate finance. And so that topic, they're talking about the need for bigger and better international financial institutions, even maybe changes to the international architecture for finance. UAE created an independent high level expert group on climate finance, which has provided recommendations for how to keep reorganize the international climate finance system moving forward. So those types of issues, if you hear about them, might be that it's focused on the UAE presidency's action agenda. Their objective is called putting nature, people, lives and livelihoods at the heart of climate action. I want to be sure you know under that there are two declarations expected, one on sustainable agriculture, resilient food systems and climate action, and one a declaration on climate and health. As Tracy said, these are opportunities really to kind of have a pre-discussion. These issues aren't yet embedded in any work programs for the UNFCCC, but they'll probably make a really good story for the journalists who are there. So if you start hearing about a declaration on climate and health, that's where this is coming from. And then just the final point, the UAE has made as part of its action agenda, mobilizing for an inclusive COP. And so they, I guess right now, some stories are saying that there might be up to 70,000 people in Dubai for this meeting, the meetings in the facilities where the World Expo was. So it's unusual to have so much space and they want to fill it. But so it is going to be a really big, well-attended event according to the reports that I've been hearing. So stay tuned. Thank you, Lynn. Anne and I will be there for the first week. So I don't know about the other 69,998, but we'll certainly be there. Just very briefly, a couple of things that Lynn mentioned I wanted to plug. One is we have an update to our fossil fuel subsidies fact sheet coming out in the next few weeks. That's one of our most popular educational resources. So I will just flag that for everyone. We also have two of Lynn's colleagues coming up as guests on our podcast. In a couple of weeks talking about fossil fuel subsidies and specifically some really interesting work that's taking place in Canada right now. So if you want to learn about efficient or inefficient or unabated fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel consumption, that's a really good podcast episode and that'll be coming up. We've had a lot of people join us. Also wanted to just let everyone know that we'll have a question and answer period. If you're in the room, we'll have a microphone and we will also be taking questions online. If you have a question, you can send us an email, the email address to use as ask, that's ASK at EESI.org. Our third panelist today is Zoha Shahwu. Zoha is a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, U.S., working in the Equitable Transitions Programs. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between climate change, inequality and sustainable development. Zoha explores synergies and conflicts between climate goals and sustainable development goals with a particular focus on inequality repercussions. She also works on climate finance, including loss and damage finance. Zoha, welcome to the lectern. I'll turn it over to you so I can get you started. Thank you. Thank you so much. Super excited to be here. So what is loss and damage? I find that it's best to start with an example. These are some photos from field work in Nepal where I was earlier this year in the summer, which shows the devastating impacts of flooding that they faced way back in 2021. And as you can see, things are still pretty devastating. You have losses as a result of homes being destroyed. You have kind of where you see the river there with the rocks all around. That all used to be agricultural land. So that means a loss of people's livelihoods and ability to produce food and provide for themselves and their families. You have bridges destroyed, which means that they cannot necessarily go into the cities to sell their produce and to sell their food. So you have losses as a result of, not being able to perform their business activities. And so all of these are study estimated that it amounts to about 52K US dollars of losses and damages per household. And these have not been compensated. And this is particularly an issue because these communities have contributed the least to climate change, but are already suffering from its impacts. And so the argument goes that developing countries who have contributed the least deserve some form of financial compensation for these losses and damages to enable them to recover, to rebuild their homes, their livelihoods, to have psychological support for the losses that they faced. And that developed countries who have contributed the most are, have some responsibility to pay to enable them to recover from these losses. So that's kind of the rationale behind loss and damage and it's found its way into the climate negotiations. There's not a formal definition of it and the definition itself is contentious, but I won't go into that too much. But I broadly refers to the impacts of climate change that cannot or have not been avoided through reducing emissions or adapting to the impacts that are being faced. So you might have sudden onset events such as a flood or a cyclone which causes losses and damages, or you might have slow onset events such as sea level rise over time, which is causing coastal erosion, for example. And importantly, IPCC reports find that even if we are able to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, there would still be losses and damages that you cannot adapt to. And that really justifies the need for financial support to enable those who are offering the most from climate impacts to recover from those losses and damages. And some estimates show that losses and damages could reach around $290 to 580 billion US dollars per year by 2030 in developing countries alone. How has this issue been discussed in the negotiation? So it was actually first brought up by Vanuatu on behalf of small island states way back in 1991 when the UNFCCC was being agreed, I don't know the exact language, but they proposed it as an insurance mechanism to say that richer countries would have to pay poorer countries who are suffering from sea level rise, particularly small island nations. This did not ultimately make it into the text of the UNFCCC convention. And not much progress really happened on this topic until 2013 when this body called the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage was established to kind of provide support for different functions, mainly to boost knowledge on loss and damage, strengthen collaboration and coordination, link different bodies together, and then something that was broadly termed as action and support, which developing countries interpreted as meaning financial support for loss and damage, but finance itself was quite a taboo in these discussions and has been until pretty recently. In the Paris Agreement, there is a specific article on loss and damage, but it specifically states that it does not provide a basis for liability or compensation that has been used as an excuse quite a lot for developed countries to close off any discussions on finance for loss and damage specifically. And it's really in 2019 when developing countries became much more united around the call for loss and damage finance. And it was in 2021 when they kind of proposed a specific fund for loss and damage. It ultimately did not make it into the agreement or the outcome in 2021. And it was only last year when we had this breakthrough decision to establish a new fund specifically focused on loss and damage. So just to shed a little bit of light on this, and I think this decision was really seen as a victory for climate justice and particularly for the global South because it really came after demands from developing countries, but also civil society, indigenous groups, and other global South actors too. And they really framed it as compensation or almost as reparations for the climate impacts that they were already facing. And so COP 27 was also the first time that loss and damage finance was on the official agenda of the COP. So this time last year we were discussing, is it going to be on the agenda? Is it not gonna be on the agenda? Will there be any outcome? And then the first time that it was actually negotiated, it led to this outcome of having a fund. And I think that really shows how it's really hard to predict the outcomes of these things and things move really fast. And yeah, so I think it was really seen as quite a victory for climate justice, even though when it was established, it was as an empty shell, there's no money in it, there's no target, and there are no obligations for countries to put any money into it either. What has happened since then? So there was a transitional committee set up composed of developed and developing country members to discuss how the fund could be operationalized. What could it look like? How would it be governed? Where would it sit? Who would pay into it? Who would receive money from it? They have met five times this year. They were supposed to only meet three times, but they could not agree on a lot of things and so had to add two additional meetings and have actually finally agreed to draft decision text as of yesterday, day before, which will then be forwarded on to the COP and ideally negotiated and adopted. Nobody is happy with the draft decision text. It is kind of a lowest common denominator kind of thing. If you're following these topics, you may have heard that the US transitional committee member walked out of the room when it was being gaveled down because they did not agree to some of the things that were in the text and so have raised the concern that it does not reflect the views of all parties or all transitional committee members. What are some of the key points of contention here? The first is really about where the funds should sit. Developing countries have really advocated for something that is a standalone and separate fund under the UNFCCC and that's because they want all of the language around accountability and historical responsibility within the UNFCCC to apply to the fund. They wanna stay with the same divisions of developed and developing countries that are currently under the convention and they want a system of accountability. That is what they have proposed. Developed countries, especially the US, have strongly pushed for the fund to be hosted under the World Bank. There are several reasons for this. Maybe we'll not go into it, but ultimately what they have agreed is that the World Bank will be an interim host of the fund for a period of four years and then after that we'll see. There's no exit strategy agreed in the text so it could be that the World Bank ends up the host forever. Why this is problematic is because the World Bank primarily provides loan-based finance which is not really suitable for loss and damage. You wouldn't want communities suffering to have to pay back loans for their recovery. And then also there are issues of direct access and country ownership. It would be much harder for developing countries to have a say over what the finance looks like and how it is used when the World Bank is largely donor-driven and serves donor agendas. In short, I'm happy to answer more questions about this if it's interesting. The other contentious point is who will pay into the fund and who will be eligible to receive funding. So developed countries, conventionally classified as developed, EU, US, et cetera, have long argued for broadening the contributor base so that countries such as China or Saudi Arabia or UAE also have to pay into the fund even though they are currently classified as developing. I think that was their biggest frustration with the text is that that does not make it through. And then also that, I think the text says that it urges developed countries to contribute on a voluntary basis or something like this, which apparently was still too strong language for them whereas developing countries kind of argue that it wasn't strong enough and it doesn't really obligate developed countries to contribute any money into the fund, right? And then they developed countries have also wanted to limit the eligibility of the funding only to lease developed countries in small island states. The text now states that a minimum percentage will go to SIDS and LDCs but it does not state who are the most vulnerable countries that will be eligible to receive funding. There's also the question of the scope of the fund. So what will it fund? Will it fund everything, all losses and damages from slow and sudden onset events, non-economic losses and damages or will it be focused only on immediate recovery or medium term recovery or long term recovery? That question has still not been resolved, I don't think. It's a question of governance. So civil society have long been advocating for the communities affected by loss and damage to have a say in what the fund looks like, where the funding goes, how it is used, by whom. Conventional climate funds only operate with countries or parties being on the board of the fund. There was a strong push for civil society to be on the board of the loss and damage fund. One of the early US proposals even included it actually and then the fourth TC meeting had kind of two indigenous representatives and one climate migrant representative as non-voting members on the board that has all been watered down and now there are no civil society representatives on the board of the fund. So the question still remains of how affected communities will be involved in decision making and how much power and agency they will have. Then there's a question of accessibility. There's a longstanding challenge in climate finance which is that funds are often very inaccessible to developing countries, particularly those with low capacity. It takes a very long time for them to meet all of the requirements to be able to access funds and receive funds. It takes several years for funds to even be received and that really wouldn't work for loss and damage when there's a sense of urgency to recover, right? So how can the fund be much more accessible and move away from this kind of project-based model? Will the fund only be grants-based or also include loans? How will it reach the most vulnerable communities on the ground? Will there be any mechanisms for communities to access funds directly rather than having to go through international bodies or their governments? And how will the fund relate to other mechanisms of financing for adaptation, development, humanitarian aid? I will skip this actually. So to end with, I just wanted to highlight some of what our research has suggested that COP28 should consider, depending on how much scope there is now that there is a draft text, but we've really suggested that countries that are unable to meet the full eligibility requirements such as conflict-prone areas are often the ones that are most vulnerable to climate change, so they should not be left out. And so what the fund could do is have much smaller-scale funding with lower due diligence requirements for countries which is then scaled up over time, for example. We've also suggested that funding needs to be grants-based but also that it needs to be flexible and not the conventional project-based model which is that you apply for funding, you implement a project, and then it ends because loss and damage realities change on the ground and shift as time passes. And so you need to kind of make sure that there's a lot of flexibility that countries have more programmatic finance that goes directly into their national plans and policies and builds on that and gives them flexibility to change plans as things change on the ground. The need to ensure that finance reaches the local level. So one thing that we've been recommending is for the fund to have a small grants window that is directly accessible to local NGOs so that they might not all funds necessarily go through the government which can have challenges in some countries, for example. The need for participatory and representative processes, I already mentioned the board, but you could also have more devolved decision-making at the national and subnational level. And then the need for full spectrum approaches or some kind of coordination between different windows of financing such as adaptation, development and humanitarian aid. So these are our three reports that we've released on operationalizing the loss and damage fund and the links are there. So if that's interesting, I'll read them and thank you. Sorry that you felt like you had to skip a slide but never fear if you wanna go back and look at that slide, they're posted on our website as well as so you can get these links. And I think the additional, the reports are also posted or if there aren't with your permission we'd be happy to post them. So if you wanna go back and get to the reports that Zoha mentioned, we'll do our best to make that as easy as possible for everybody. That brings us to Ryan Finnegan. Ryan is the deputy manager for US Climate Policy Action at the World Wildlife Fund. In this role, Ryan manages the work of America is all in an alliance of mayors, governors, business and healthcare executives, university presidents, tribal and faith leaders, advancing national mobilization on climate. Welcome, Ryan, to the briefing today and I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Daniel and thanks to ESI for having me really excited to be part of this panel. Really wonderful to hear from the rest of the panelists getting really into the weeds about the key negotiating issues on the agenda for COP 28. I think what I'm gonna do just to start off my remarks is take a step back and kind of acknowledge something that was acknowledged up at the top, which is that these are really large, kind of chaotic convenings when we're talking about the conference of parties and when we're talking about these annual climate negotiations. There are, of course, the formal agenda. As we make this kind of like long pivot towards implementation, I think what is happening on the sidelines and what the agendas are of folks who are coming in on the ground. There's 70,000 participants with 70,000 different agendas in some ways, all trying to work to advance the ball on climate action whether we're talking about kind of like mitigation and implementation, adaptation, loss and damage. There's a lot of key factors that are coming into play. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look from a US perspective at some of the stakeholders that you can expect to see at COP, what some of the rationales might be, and some of the work that you'll see in different scopes and scenarios throughout the two weeks of COP. And I'll caveat that by also saying everything that I'm gonna present on is, again, just gonna be a slice and a sliver of what the US will ultimately be bringing to the table. When we're talking about broader stakeholders at COP beyond the negotiators and beyond the formal USG administration, you'll have actors that want to influence those negotiations that are either providing expertise or providing commentary, strengthening relationships across international boundaries, a lot of the soft diplomacy or making connection points between like-minded actors when we're talking about kind of the list of professionals that Daniel mentioned in my introduction when we're talking about the private sector and we're talking about local governments. There's a lot of folks who wanna talk and learn lessons from counterparts across the world to advance work. COP is ultimately a forcing mechanism, not only for negotiators, but for a lot of other folks in the climate space. And so you'll see a lot of shared announcements coming from different actors, new commitments, or really doing some of that knowledge, sharing and knowledge exchange. On the sidelines of a lot of COP, you're gonna see a lot of programming and events, bilateral meetings, and of course advocacy to really help to shape and influence these outcomes. I'm going to jump into some detail in just terms of tracking who from the US might be at COP in these other spaces. I wanna set that part of the conversation up by just acknowledging, I think the US has a really interesting role to play in this pivot point, right? So the US was obviously a key negotiator and a key lead in getting us the Paris Agreement and getting us this framework that we're now working within. US leadership has also been defined in a lot of different ways over the past, since 2015, 2016, when the Paris Agreement came into force, there's been a bit of a roller coaster with respect to how the US is showing up and where levels of commitment are. And so I think the last key point to set up is that as we make this kind of like broader pivot into all of society and acknowledging the role that different corners of society play in the climate space that the US has been helping to lead some of the charge here. Just tracking some stakeholders that you can expect to participate at COP. You'll have a lot of tribal nations representatives, the National Congress of American Indians being one such conglomerate of tribal nations leaders who you'll see on the ground. We're expecting two governors, dozens of state agency leads who are working on implementation in a state context. 20 US mayors and other elected leaders, just having posted a subset of some of the states that those leaders represent. Over 100 academic representatives from dozens of US colleges and universities, large and small businesses, investors, the finance world really comes into play obviously with respect to COP, faith groups, healthcare organizations, cultural institutions. There really is every corner of society is represented in one way or another. This next slide I think was shared previously during a Tracy or Lynn's presentation. But again, when we're talking about thematic days, there's obviously thematic cohesion with some of the negotiating elements. These thematic days also allow us to direct some pointed activities. So there's any number of kind of like side programs that'll be aligned with this formal agenda that is set up by the COP28 presidency. I'm going to maybe one particular element that we haven't covered in too much detail is something that I think is really interesting and unique to COP. It's unique to, it fits really naturally in with the work that I do at the World Wildlife Fund and America's all in, which is this acknowledgement of local climate actors with respect to implementation. So just a few key points on something called the local climate action summit, which is going to be complementary to the world climate action summit that's going to kick off the COP in the first few initial days is this first large scale convening of subnational and non-federal leaders from various international contexts that are really focusing in on implementation. Back in the Paris Agreement, Paris saw a huge contingency of international mayors really like starting to make the pivot on importance of local climate actors and local benefits and local solutions kind of like driving our national and international goals. The local climate action summit is really designed to help carry that forward. And so around finance, around enhancing ambition through integrated national and subnational solutions, around fast-tracking the local energy transition and around resilience and adaptation, there are going to be hundreds of international mayors and governors and other influential national leaders working collaboratively and at points sharing the stage with those high level, federal and national counterparts. And so that is a local climate summit that'll be happening on the early days of the presidency. What I'm going to, well, I'll pivot into next is talking just in a little bit more detail specific to the work that myself and my team at America's All-In helped to shape that COP. And so what we try and do is take any US subnational non-federal actors and just give a sense of cohesion, allow folks the opportunity to connect across these different constituencies that'll be at COP and drive a unified narrative that is supportive of US ambition, that is protecting positive pressure towards stronger ambitious outcomes, both towards the US federal government and towards the international climate regime at large when we're talking about some of these formal negotiations. So as part of one of many pavilions and physical spaces that'll be on the ground at COP, we'll have a dedicated space that we hope will serve as a hub for US leaders and a lot of the leaders who I mentioned as folks that we're tracking to convene with one another to move the ball forward and some highlights from that program that is still very much being put together as we approach these final few weeks of COP. You'll have the US subnationals working at the US center, at the formal US center as well as then opening their own space. For America's All In, we have an air quality report that is coming out. Part of the work that my organization and the America's All In coalition has done has been to help track subnational contributions to our US and DC goals. So the US has currently on the table a 50 to 52% emissions reduction goal for 2030. As we come out of the stock take, countries will be looking at how they can further enhance their ambition. And so a lot of understanding those contributions when we take into account progress that has been made domestically, such as the IRA opportunities that have unlocked in the past year as such as the regulatory suite that is being developed and that is in progress, how we can move the ball forward with enhanced action at the state and local level. That'll be really key to a lot of our conversations. The US climate alliance, which is an alliance of 25 odd state governors, we'll have a presence at COP, we'll be sharing progress from select key states, I think pushing forward a similar narrative. We'll have conversations focused on business solutions and engagement with federal policies and federal members. And then putting forward opportunities for, again, these US stakeholders to meet with international counterparts. So mayors on mayors, governors on governors, it's gonna be I think an emerging theme for a lot of the broader US stakeholder landscape at COP. Had that slide. So I think what I'll close out is by, again, just reiterating the complexities of navigating COP. I think a lot of the folks in this room might be working with members who are either going to be on the ground or keeping track. I think Daniel laid out a lot of the resources that EESI is going to put out. I think all of our speakers have also pointed to kind of like a lot of the complexities that are involved and there's been some good resources that are already shared. I would encourage anybody who's going to be tracking COP either on the ground or from back home in the United States to look at some of the formal presidency programs, kind of understand what the landscape is. This is again, just like a small selection of where there are potential resources that you all can learn from and dive into. And then finally, I'll close with just, this would be a follow up for folks, but Gina McCarthy, who was the formal national climate advisor, now the managing chair for America is all in, recently just put out, I think a really helpful framing op-ed on the health and climate nexus and how that is really coming to a head at COP as was kind of like detailed out earlier as well. So it pushed folks towards that. And then as our team, our organization continues to do some of this non-federal delegation tracking, we really would love to stay in touch with anybody who wants to make those connection points between US subnational actors. And so if any of you are kind of like tracking delegations or wanting to get more involved or plugged in, we would really love to be a point of follow up. And so I've got my contact information up there for anybody who's working specifically with the congressional delegation of the staff delegation. I have my colleague Ben at WWF's contact information there as well, we're kind of running point for some of these US engagement opportunities. But I think that is it for me. So Daniel, I'll toss it back to you. That was great. Thank you very much. Yeah, America's all in, spent a lot of time with that pavilion last year. It was really, really interesting programming. I've been promising questions and we'll get to them, but we have a special guest. And so I'd like to give her an opportunity to address the crowd. Anna Yelverton is the director of legislative affairs in the office of the special presidential envoy for climate at the State Department. Anna previously worked for Senator Chris Coons and as deputy legislative director covering climate, energy, environment, agriculture policy. She just happened to stop by today. And Anna, if you'd like to come up and say a few words, happy to have you, happy to welcome you to the lectern. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. And thanks everyone. Thanks ESI for organizing this and all of you for being here. It's really great to see the congressional interest in COP this year and over the last couple of years. I first had the chance to attend a COP in my role in Senator Coons office, COP 26, which was a really fun time to be there with America being back at the table with the Biden administration and so many people from around the world coming together. But given that many of our panelists have much more experience with the COP, so I'll leave it to the experts for questions and we'll be really brief. Primarily wanted to introduce myself as a resource for you if you or your boss are traveling to the COP or just have questions about what's happening there, please feel free to introduce yourself afterwards. I'll be sitting in the front row here. Would love to make sure that you have the information that you need. Congress of course plays such a critical role in advancing the United States climate agenda and this is an important year with the global stocktake for all of us to be taking a look at the progress that has been made since the Paris Agreement, what the remaining gaps are and what are the next steps that we need to take and of course Congress has played a role in all of those things from the action through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and CHIPS to whether or not we make the appropriate investments to achieve that 50 to 52% emissions reductions by 2030 that we're all working so hard to achieve and then to figuring out what are the additional next steps that we as a country can come together to decide to do. So you and your bosses play just, oh, I'm so sorry, a really important role in what we're doing and just very excited to share that we have a really robust delegation from across the US government attending the COP this year, including Bipartisan members of the House and Senate and of course Bipartisanship around global climate action is going to be really important for the work that we're all doing to be enduring so that's very great to see. It's also an opportunity, a really important COP to see progress and achieve successful outcomes on some of the mandated elements that the panelists already covered in depth, such as the global stock take and loss and damage and also in addressing climate finance. And I wanted to just highlight that because it's one of the issues that Congress can play the most critical role in terms of deciding what resources we can make available to address climate globally and in particular to make sure that we're scaling the types of concessional finance that Soha just talked about that are so important for the countries that are most vulnerable to climate impacts. In addition to those kind of main negotiations topics, we're working to advance a range of bilateral initiatives and public private partnerships. So if you are interested in learning more about any of that, please let me know. I believe that Ryan's slide had the official UAE Presidency COP website. There's also a COP website on the State Department's website so please take a look at that. We'll be posting there the schedule for the US Center which is where basically USG officials or others that have registered for events through us will be posting events that will be live streamed and public, so just a great resource. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. As Ryan said, it's chaotic and I think someone flag that we're expecting tens of thousands of folks at COP this year. And so just on behalf of the spec office at the State Department wanted to share that we're here as a resource and really appreciate the work of all of you and your bosses to advance our climate goals. So thanks for having me. That was great, thank you. Secretary Kerry seemed to be everywhere last year. I don't really know how he did it. I think there's might be two of them. And you didn't mess up the screen. They did that on purpose because it's weird to like silhouette the panelists during the Q and A. So if you had any stress about that. So that gives us to our Q and A. One of my colleagues has a microphone. It is Maggie. Maggie will be very happy to bring microphones around to you if you have questions so that you can speak into it for our live stream audience. I'll keep an eye out for questions in our audience. One question that came in from our online audience that I'm kind of interested in cause it's something that we talk a lot about at ESI. And I didn't hear it come up a whole lot. So we might start there. And that is the status of the methane pledge. I'm curious if anyone has any commentary about maybe where that is or maybe things to be on the lookout for at COP 28. Lynn, please go ahead. I guess I don't know specifically the status but that is an example of a side agreement. So that came at Glasgow, very welcomed, but it's kind of a coalition of the willing. So it's not embedded in the official program but it is likely that this coalition of willing the people who are working on it will be there promoting it, trying to sign up some additional actors to do something about it. Great, thanks for that. That's very helpful. Tracy? Push the button, there we go. So what do you do when you don't know? You Google it. And so the lead on this, which I thought was the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and they've been tracking the methane pledge cause Lynn is spot on, I just cannot say enough that declarations can be important but I think in some ways they're kind of like UNGA resolutions, you know, they're political statements and if you have support for, yay. But especially in a COP like this one where you have a lot of difficult decisions to make and a presidency that is part of OPEC. That there's a tendency to do lots of declarations I think of like see my shiny object over here and to distract you from some of the core issues. The methane pledge though, I think to be fair I know the Biden administration has made a point of rallying G20 and G7 colleagues nations to keep up on it and so I would go to the clean and I'm not with them the Climate and Clean Air Coalition website because they do track it. But this is the challenge. Many of these declarations are not tracked whereas the outcomes of the negotiations and performance against them are tracked and what, you know, we don't care about what we don't measure. Yeah. Well, Anna had something she wanted to add and while she's making her way up to the lectern I'll mention that a major feature of our newsletter every day is a series of trackers to keep track of all sorts of things that will be going on but Anna, if you had something you want to say about the methane pledge. Yeah, we'll share it. That was very, very helpful overview just in terms of the status of the global methane pledge and just in case no one knows what the global methane pledge is it was something that the United States in partnership with the EU as I think Tracy noted launched in Glasgow at COP26. It is a pledge to take voluntary actions to reduce methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. And the reason that this is important is because methane is what we consider a super pollutant and it's global warming potential particularly in the first 20 years is significantly higher than carbon. And so that's why there's a lot of attention to methane but Tracy's right. It is a voluntary effort and there is a difference between a negotiated outcome and a kind of side pledge of this nature with country signing onto something and you need to track it and hold them accountable for it. And the global stock take is actually a really important mechanism where we could get countries to agree in a negotiated outcome to cover methane in addition to CO2 and other super pollutants as well. And so that's a really important issue for this year's COP to make sure that we are addressing those other super pollutants in the negotiated text as well to Tracy's really important point. So just throwing that out there as well. Thanks for that. Yeah, I'm glad. Thanks for the online question and thanks for Googling that Tracy. I'm glad we let you have laptops at the front table. That was very helpful. And you just got some snaps from the audience. So, okay. Yeah, I just caught that. Questions from our audience? We have a question up here, Maggie in the second row. Right there, thank you. Hi, my name is Aiden from the Asahi Shimbun Japanese newspaper. I am asking specifically, I guess it's the congressional, I know that representative Baraghan is not here, but the congressional delegation has any like particular goals that they're looking for at this particular event, this particular COP. Any insights from your work with any of the congressional delegation? Okay. Yeah, sorry, we've been talking with them but I'm not sure I can speak to that. So sorry. All right, I'll keep an eye out for questions. But in the meantime, I'll ask a question about just to help get us started. So we've talked a little bit about, actually quite a lot about COP 28 and Zohay you had that nice slide showing sort of how the loss and damage debate has evolved. But what are some other issues that you expect to be sort of top level agenda items and how have some of those changed over the years from one COP to the other? Tracy, perhaps we could start with you and we can go through the list. I told you we were gonna start with you, but. You did warn me, I just didn't know that was the question. So I'd say climate finance, climate finance and climate finance. And to me, I've tracked climate finance. I attend usually virtually now the standing committee on finance. So it's a constitutive body, meaning a COP decision created it. But again, I think of it, if we think of the legislative model we use here, you need subcommittees to tee up information, process information for a legislative act, like a COP decision. And I would say, I'm not sure of the base year. Lynn, I'm gonna ask, what do you do? A lifeline. I think there was a TV show like that, right? Call ya. That we don't have TV signal in the People's Republic of Vermont, just FYI. That's why I'm a little out of date. But climate finance now I think has most agendas. It's agenda item eight. And it now I think is up to H in terms of subparts, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. Seven. And when I first started tracking it, it usually had four. So climate finance. And that's how it's evolved over time. More parties are getting that on the agenda. And the SCF, the standing committee of finance has got a huge agenda to do research on. Thanks, Tracy. Lynn, do you have any thoughts about sort of how some of these additional issues, some of these top issues have evolved over recent cops and what might make it different this year? Well, I think it's a really interesting process to look at the Paris Agreement and what it called for. And now they've got these processes going. When they adopted the Paris Agreement, they didn't really know what a global stocktake was, but they came up with a nice name for it. And then they've had to innovate. Likewise, I mean, that they're caring through what does that global goal on adaptation actually mean? So each iteration, I think builds on the past, but they also are kind of making up, building the road as they go. So I guess I just, I'm a process person, so I really like seeing how innovative negotiators are within learning from other processes, what they've done in the past, but also trying to think about how to address problems that were in the past to overcome them. So? Sorry. Yeah, I think for me, I think really what is different this cop is that trust between developed and developing countries has really fractured in the last few years, particularly in the wake of the broken promise of the 100 billion, but also I think in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic with like, you know, a vaccine aid and like things like that not being provided to developing countries, all of these things are very interconnected. And I think that because there's a lot of lack of trust, it really jeopardizes a lot of agreements. So for example, it'd be really hard to get buy-in from developing countries on mitigation and getting them to meet their mitigation ambitions and targets if they feel like they're not being supported enough on climate finance and adaptation and loss and damage. So I think we'll see a lot of that play out if the 100 billion refined is met here this year, that could be key to restoring a lot of the trust. If there's an agreement on loss and damage finance, that could be key to restoring the trust. And then there's the question of the new collective quantified goal on climate finance, which a series of technical dialogues on that have already taken place over the last couple of years. I think that's officially to be agreed next year, but is already kind of on the table as whose interests will that reflect? Will it include a much higher target? Will it include loss and damage finance and how will it be different from how climate finance has worked in the past? There's also the Bridgetown Initiative, which is an initiative to reform what finance and international financial institutions look like. Things like debt reduction, freeing up fiscal space in developing countries. So I think all of that will be very much at the backdrop of how power and trust play out in the negotiations. Ryan? I think largely we agree with anything that folks have raised. When I think about the narrative that you expect we're going to come up with, we're going to take a lot of football points here on the team and find this is very central to it. I think the reaction to the global stock take and I think just a fresh understanding of those minds of where the gap is between current values and what we really need to achieve to keep 1.5 alive and to get our mitigation goals to take on and off some of these really big adaptation decks that are going to be front and center for a lot of folks. So this is like really, just like that emphasis that this is our first checkpoint in the character system and it's going to shape a lot of those views and I'm going to go on top. And then I think on a more optimistic angle of how we're going to be at what some of the focus was, which is I think in this particular implementation we're really acknowledging and elevating the role of actors who have not necessarily been at these negotiating tables in thinking and implementing these kind of solutions. So I hope all that works out for this to be an extra critical part of that. Zoha, something you said just reminded me that like one of the things I learned when I started learning about this is that it actually isn't just the two week period once a year, right? These are things that are happening pretty much on a continuous basis and there'll be stuff that isn't discussed as much this year as maybe last year and there'll be things that were discussed more last year. And I think that's a really helpful point that drawing this is more like a series of Gantt charts where things sort of stop and start but really they never really stop, right? They just might like fade into the background a little bit and people who are really into it kind of continue working on that. So I'm glad you made that point. We have two questions. I'll go to you on the back first. Maggie will come over to you and then we'll do our best to get to you as well. Would you speak just a little bit louder? I'm Hallya. I'm the founder of the Climate Conservation Club. And my question is, how can youth participate virtually in the youth forum on December 8th or other parts of COP28? Your question was about participating virtually. All right, thanks. I'll open that up to everybody. Thank you. Yeah, I'll kick off in the structural approach here. So did you also say the youth forum where you're talking about Koi? Yeah. So one, I would Google Youngo, like Y-O-U-N-G-O. And that is the constituency for youth that is sponsoring Koi. They have it very well organized. I attended something last week in Abu Dhabi where they have a declaration online already. And I'm very sure you can participate by this. The COP virtual participation is a little different. So full participation, including in the negotiation room is possible, but you have to have a blue badge. So you already have to have a badge, which are in hot commodity. So you have to be a badged first and then you can be a virtual participant. The good news is there's an unlimited number of virtual badges. So you just have to find an organization to get in that way. And I guess the last point, and Lynn, EMB does a lot of great stuff. You could follow them and their reports, but also the use of video, we were just talking about it before with the TC meeting, the loss and damage last committee meeting last Friday and Saturday. It's, they're really simultaneously broadcasting, webcasting, archiving it. So you could really participate that way virtually. And I would go to the UNFCCC website and look for those videos. But you can also follow UNFCCC on what used to be called Twitter. And then you'll get a lot of things in real time. Other thoughts from the panel about participating virtually? Okay, great, thanks. Maggie, we have one last question up here and it has to be very brief. But please wait for the microphone. Yeah, and if you could just probably understand you a little bit better. I'm Jonathan Haskett, I'm with CRS. And my question is on the new fund, I right now can't recollect, but it is replacing the $100 billion pledge and creating a new pledge. How is that new pledge likely to be determined? Is that entirely a political determination or is it pegged to like some determination either the global stock take or a Charmel shake implementation plan or so I guess is it primarily a negotiated figure or does it have a pay? Thanks for your question. Yep, go ahead, Lynn. No, that's a really good question. And so they've been holding a series of workshops asking that very same question. What should the timeline be? What should the quantity be? What should it be based on? Is it something that the donors should own? Is it something that's a collective objective? Is it, you know, should we tally up what the real costs are and set it based on that? Is it based on what the donors can give to it? I mean, right now it's, they're asking all these questions and airing and kind of trying to learn from each other. But so there's still a whole year of negotiations on this. And but I mean, it's gonna be a political process. So how are others any thoughts about the process leading to that number? I trace you probably knows more than me, but I mean, I think civil society and researchers have really been pushing for the target to be needs based. The 100 billion was kind of just a number pulled out of nowhere, doesn't, you know, just sounds nice, 100 billion, but it doesn't have any scientific basis on how much is actually needed. So I think, you know, assessments, independent assessments might play a role in determining the number a little bit more, like the adaptation gap report just came out, which puts a number on the gap and adaptation finance that needs to be filled. Global stock take will probably have some estimates on finance gaps. And so I feel like all of that will probably inform and give a lot of leverage to civil society and researchers to point to those numbers and say to use those as a basis for determining. But ultimately, I don't see any number that could be large enough to cover the full scale of the needs, to be honest. So I feel like it will just be something that sounds big enough, but it's probably arbitrary. Can I just offer one last resource building on, so it has good point. So for me, all roads around finance lead back to the Standing Committee on Finance. And part of their agenda has included needs-based calculations. They produce their first report, they're working on their second report. And so it could be a one-stop shopping site because they will look at the peer reviewed literature that researchers are doing in addition to conducting their own research via country parties. Thanks, great. Well, we are at time. If anyone, Ryan, if you have, or anyone has any last minute thoughts, maybe about like essential reading in addition to our newsletter, yes. But if there's any other reading, Ryan, I knew you had a lot of great links in your slides. Anything else you'd like to share with our congressional staff audience about how to keep up with your work during COPNM? Maybe we'll come this direction through the panel. Yeah, sure. So I think a lot of the resources I included should be in the slides for easy access. Again, just a sliver of kind of like what we use personally and then within our team to track some of the building's on. For any hard direct work, americansalli.com is our website We'll have our own stream live streams on the YouTube channel for the two dozen or so events that we'll be handling millions of leads on. And yeah, I think that's actually, otherwise it's a lot of our shoot, to tell you from various sources to pull together other resources that we'll work with. Thank you. Zoha, any additional resources you want to bring up? Yeah, I mean, apart from ENB, I would mention the third world network, which is civil society, which puts out really more global South perspectives and marginalized voices and what their perspective is on how the negotiations are going and where things stand. They have the newsletter, I think every day of the COP. And then similarly, Climate Action Network also puts out a lot of information. I think they do almost a daily press briefing on the negotiations. So it's interesting just to get the civil society perspective from those sources. Thank you. And Lynn, I think everyone wants you to say this. Yes. So IISD has published the Earth Negotiations Bulletin for about 31 years. We send teams to COPs, to environmental meetings, to write reports on what's happening. So at the COP, we'll have about seven people. I'll be one of them sitting in the back of the room writing what's happening in the negotiating sessions. And we write up the report and publish it on our website, enb.isd.org, by the end of the day. So it's 2000 to 4000 words, quick summary of which groups met, what were some key issues. We also include a column called In the Corridors where we try to give a little context to what was going on there. And so we'll be doing that every single day of the COP. We also have photos from the COP so you can see kind of what the milieu is and who the key actors are. So you can connect speakers with country names. And then at the very end of the meeting, our team will stay in Dubai for two extra days and we write a full summary and analysis of the meeting and publish that basically before we go home. So within 72 hours of the close of the COP whenever that may be on enb.isd.org, you'll find our summary. And so I guess our informal motto is we listen so you don't have to, but it's really, I guess we do it as it's supporting delegations that cannot be in all negotiating rooms at the same time. So they have a chance to see what's going on. We also do it so that we can help NGOs know where the negotiation is because you don't just walk into tell a delegate, this is the proposal when it's the wrong stage in the negotiation. So it just, it's to help people really engage in the negotiation itself. Thank you, that was a good plug. And Tracy, this gives you the last word any essential resources? Yes, but I just need to say we're in the gold room. This is the gold standard. I cannot, you know, these are PhDs. Either they've got them or they're in process. They follow issues in the room because they've done it as part of their PhD research. It's very both in depth knowledge, but concisely written. Oh, and they stay up all night producing this for us. Okay, so the Duffer in me, Ringo, R-I-N-G-O with the earring. If you Google that and UNF trip, no. Well, anyway, UC3 and Second Nature. We put on a series of webinars that I highly recommend, especially if you're going for the first or fifth time to look at. Number one will basically demystify everything. It goes for about an hour and a half. Webinar two looks deeper into the constitutive body like the Standing Committee on Finance. And then webinar three is always what's on the table for COPX and we're doing that Thursday night. So if you go again to the Ringo website, I usually Google even still Ringo and UNFCCC, you'll find it pretty easily. Yeah, thank you so much. And if it doesn't come up right away, you can just do like clap I-N-G-O and then you can Google clap, clap, N-G-O and eventually it'll come up, right? All right, so that will do it for us today. I hope everyone will join us online on November 27th for our briefing about the first global stock take. I think our panelists did a great job teeing that issue up and I encourage everyone to sign up for your newsletter. If you signed the sheet that was going around, just know that we have a strict privacy policy. If you're signing up for our COP newsletter, that means you're signing up for our COP newsletter and that's about it. Hopefully you'll sign up for other stuff, but at least there's that. These, Tracy, Lynn, Zoha and Ryan, thank you so much for being tremendous panelists for us today, we really, really appreciate it. I think they deserve a quick round of applause for sharing their expertise with us. I'd also like to say once again, big thanks to Representative Baragon and her great staff for joining, for making her participation today possible. Thanks to Representative Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for help with the room today. They're always just such a treat to work with. I'd also like to call out my policy team colleagues, Anna up here in front, Molly up here in front and Nicole sort of in the middle. We will be, well, mostly them, me a little bit, but they'll be really kind of the heart and soul along with Allison and Erin and others on our COMS team during COP. But if you want to, I don't see any of them wearing their lapel pins, but I know, we go over this every briefing. But seriously, if you're in the room and you want to meet up with Molly Anna and Nicole, I encourage you to do that if that would be helpful to make the connection. They'll be the ones sort of really churning out the newsletter during COP. I'd also like to say thanks to Dan O and Omri and Allison and Erin once again. We have three great interns. They're all seated in the back in a row. Laura, Zoe and Maggie, thank you very much. Thank you to Anna for joining us today. Really means a lot for you to swing by. I know you have a busy day. And big thanks to Troy. Our videographer for helping with producing the event today. Sorry for going 10 minutes over, oops. But we had 10 pounds of COP in a five-pound COP bag. There's only so much we can do. But thanks to everybody and hope to see you back on November 27th. And there's our survey again, if you didn't take it the first time, that would be great too. Thank you.