A murmuration on the 29th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP29), held in Baku, Azerbaijan November 2024
By Clea Harrelson
This poem is a reflection on my experiences at the 29th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP29), held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024. Over 50,000 people attended this event, and each conference of parties (COP) since the inaugural event in 1995 has served as a focal point for defining the climate goals of environmental organizations, countries, and heads of state. It’s a global performance of politics, power, and mind-numbing bureaucracy, and it’s also a place where hope for a different set of shared global relations lives on. I wrote this poem, or murmuration after the contortions and collective pulses of birds in flight, from a series of short jottings – from within the convention center itself, from travels to and from the site, and from wanderings in other parts of Baku. COP29 has been dubbed the ‘finance COP’ by news outlets and others, so throughout this piece I attempt to draw attention to the presence of money through references to manat (the local currency), the material cleanliness and professional polish that is often a feature of wealth, the extravagance of downtown Baku coffee scenes, and the notion of grants as a tool for climate action. Advocates for countries who face the greatest exposure to climate change burdens often sharply criticize the use of predatory loans from the Global North to the Global South to fund essential climate responses, leading to a sometimes written, sometimes chanted mantra of ‘grants not loans.’ As a whole, this piece is my attempt to process what feels like a precariously distant nexus of government action with the reality that hope is a call for discipline, and how we all choose to engage in these processes matters. Like birds in flight, thousands of people showing up to one place and time to discuss climate action can take interesting shapes if we allow ourselves to see.
“I slept three hours last night,”
someone says to a reporter.
Hopes for an early night are not high,
and no one can really leave.
It’s their job, after all,
to wait.
Confined to an Olympic stadium
that’s never hosted champions.
Petite media stages line the side wall,
staff sprawl with nothing to report.
We wait.
Protesters hold signs and sing.
We wait.
Manat for coffee flows.
We wait.
Suits fall asleep in chairs.
Statement, counterstatement.
Intervention, but no interruption,
just another statement.
They blame weak leadership,
but it’s weak will.
“Hey, we met last year, right?”
Comrades of COP.
They’ll see each other again next year too,
only their ties will be different.
And staff sweep right up until the end,
mostly teenagers dressed in
shades of pistachio green,
eyes trained to the smallest croissant crumb.
No debris will be entertained.
Can’t fix our relationship with climate,
but at least the photos
documenting our demise
will show clean floors
and well-kept streets.
After the waiting,
and the dismay,
I prop myself up with a coffee by a park.
Three older women fuss over drinks,
and demand blankets for the chill.
Honey, they request,
peering up from under scarves and layers of warmth.
The waiter brings honey.
Wine, tea, women who lunch in Baku.
My mind murmurs,
steeping like their leaves,
in the seemingly failed attempt
to agree to treat people
like they deserve to live,
while I sit in a park
drinking coffee
I usually don’t even like.
But despair is a mirage
that makes it seem
like this has always been.
If you squint, you see,
maybe the key has always been waiting,
not caving to stillness,
but plotting,
moving with patience and conviction,
as deep as their pockets,
and occasionally falling asleep on couches,
but continuing to show up to places
where people are fighting
about the future.
The venue will change,
as will the shades of green,
but maybe you’ll see a friend from last year
with a new tie,
who also thinks
grants are better than loans,
and people deserve to live,
so that we can all be as comfortable,
as ladies who lunch in Baku,
if we want to.