Blend, Clash, and Onward
My week at COP28 was about taking ownership of my global citizenship and breaking down walls to form meaningful connections. From engaging with the world’s greatest climate-action leaders at Bloomberg Green and striking up a conversation about Senegal’s sustainable agriculture with a UN delegate during a shuttle ride, to being mind-blown by startups holding the technical solutions for a circular economy, I immersed myself in the global momentum for change along with four other Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action (SVYCA) delegates (Radhika Goel, Diya Kandhra, Kaushik Tota, and Peter Pham), Executive Director Rohan Pandit, and SVYCA Founder Hoi Poon.
Leaving the gloomy weather of New Haven for the coastline of Dubai, I didn’t know what to expect. I was looking forward to reuniting with friends and mentors from my chosen family SVYCA. However, in addition to excitement, I carried some doubts and worries, such as whether COP28 in Dubai (a city known for its leadership in the oil industry) could deliver the leap needed to unify the fight for climate change and keep the goal of 1.5 Celsius alive.
After a semester of analyzing countries’ carbon emission performance at Yale, I knew that meeting countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) goals by 2030 and achieving the long-term goal of net zero by 2050 required phasing out fossil fuels. And this would only be possible if countries’ urgently expanded their renewable energy mix through growth infrastructures and policies. The question was how to do this, given that low and middle-income countries lack the trillions in capital to even begin a renewable energy transition.
Upon arriving in the Green Zone (which consists of interactive learning hubs for the public to explore climate innovations, art, and expert panels), I found optimism in climate finance. Specifically, I was surprised by the overwhelming emphasis on blended finance to “unlock the trillions.” This is a strategy that gives investors the agency to choose different risk tolerances within projects to accelerate high-impact investments outside of the developed markets. This strategy addresses the critical gap of scaling up capital flows in less-mature energy sectors like industrials (steel, light, aluminum, cement, paper, and chemical productions), hydrogen, and buildings (the construction, heating, and cooling of homes and businesses). This framework of collective risk sharing allows government and philanthropy funding (the concessionary investors) to serve as a capital safety cushion for private sector investors who hold tremendous assets but who also have lower risk tolerance and higher return expectations.
Beyond intense exposure to climate finance, my week at COP28 was filled with memorable sparks from the diversity of ideas, voices, and perspectives. EcoLoo’s no-flush, water-free sustainable toilet renewed my understanding of how toilets could operate in times of extreme drought. Saudi Arabia’s goal of planting 600 million trees by 2030 pushed climate ambition to a new level. Korea’s compacted nuclear fission technology cultivating a new frontier for nuclear energy and hydropower expansion. JEPLAN, a clothes recycling company, grounding circular economy as a practical goal in Japan’s economy. The fully-integrated solar panels and upgraded ventilation systems in K-12 public schools in the UAE reminded me of our fight for AB 841 (a CA bill SVYCA supported, which provided funding for upgrading air ventilation and water filtration systems in public schools and accelerated the installation of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles).
Youth Day gave us the chance to form alliances with youth-led non-profits in the Global South, step outside of our comfort zone to advocate for more progressive climate education, seek intergenerational collaborations, and garner support from renowned climate leaders from the United Nations. Every single conversation at COP28 confronted, challenged, and shifted my paradigm of beliefs about the climate crisis. While listening to the resilient stories of climate refugees, calls for a more empathetic world, and cries of suffering that brought me to tears, I realized the climate crisis is not about climate change alone.
The climate crisis is a crisis of democracy, inspired by authoritarian populism provoked by climate refugees crossing international borders to escape unlivable conditions. Moreover, it is a crisis of artificial anxiety solidified by echo chambers that deprive us of a shared base of knowledge for collective reasoning. Leading U.S. environmentalist and former United States Vice President Al Gore believes that solving the climate crisis requires a “polysolution.”
“We have a shared planetary priority to save humanity's future,” said Gore. “Getting our collective act together, in order to solve the climate crisis, could be the engine that [pulls] solutions for democracy and capitalism and the other existential crises. Because if we can reconstruct an ability to share a common base of accepted knowledge and reason together towards solutions for our crises, I think that is the pathway to restoration of sanity and self-governance.”
Carrying the weight of Gore’s words with me, I strolled around the flagpoles for the last time as my COP28 journey came to an end. My heart grew heavy, knowing that in reality, we are far from a solution. Yet, instead of giving into the feeling of defeat and disappointment, I savored the moment for as long as I could while my mind wandered to the words of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”:
“That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
not because we will never again know defeat,
but because we will never again sow division.
…
If we’re to live up to our own time,
then victory won’t lie in the blade
but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade
the hill we climb
if only we dare it.”
If there’s anything that I’ve taken away from COP28 with absolute clarity,
it is that we dare.