Welcome to zero.

I am Akshatrati.

This week a conversation with the COP thirty president.

It is the sixth of November and I have made it to Brazil where today world leaders are gathering in Berlin to kickoff COP thirty, the annual United Nations Climate Conference.

It is a.

Strange year to be hosting a COP meeting.

On the one hand, it's a year to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the signature achievement of these climate negotiations.

On the other hand, the US, the world's second largest emitter, said in January that it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, though the formal exit won't happen till twenty twenty six.

The US has also said that they will be sending no major government representatives to Berlin.

To add to the troubles, recent ultilateral climate negotiations at the International Maritime Organization and during the Plastics Treaty conversation have fallen apart in spectacular fashion, mainly driven by the US that is making concerted efforts to direct climate policies globally.

In the phase of that, it's been frustrating for many climate advocates that Brazil hasn't given any real indication of what it hopes to achieve from COP thirteen negotiations, other than saying it would like to focus on implementing the many promises that countries have made at previous corps.

So to try and get a better understanding of what will take place over the next two weeks, I sat down with COP thirty President Andre Korea the Logo for a live conversation at Bloomberg neef's summit in San Paolo.

I wanted to know what he hopes this COP can achieve, how Brazil plans to work around a belligerent US government, and what is the viable to increase climate finance to developing countries.

How are you feeling fine?

Well, Andre, welcome to this Bloomberg and EF event and welcome to a live taping of the Zero podcast.

This will be my fifth COP and before we come to what needs to be delivered at this COP, let me just recognize that it's going to be a marathon.

It's two weeks of non stop talking, non stop negotiation, and a lot less sleep.

So what are your tips and tricks to survive COP?

Well, my first COP was in two thousand and two.

So let's say that I've seen a few, not all of them.

Don't think that I go every year to that very special experience.

But I believe that this is going to be really a very different cop because in the preparation of the cop, what we call the mobilization period, I think that most people agreed and realized that cops have been much more successful than people think.

We have approved so many things, we can already do so many things, we have mandage to do so many things that this cop can truly be the first cop that effectively is an implementation cop.

So I think that this is what is driving some optimism in all of us that we are going into a cop not as the usual cop.

So I want to spend a lot of our time talking about deliverables.

But before we come to the deliverables, I understand there are still delegations looking for accommodation at Blean.

Is that the case, I don't think so.

I believe that the accommodation issue in Berlin was first to have rooms for all affordable rooms for all the delegations, because we need everybody to go, and this has been already confirmed.

Now that people are seeing that the prices are going down, etc.

Et cetera.

I think that some delegations are growing, which I think is great.

They are going to discover the amazing food of Bilaying and the many charms of Bilay, and so they are most welcome, and I believe that they will find some ice rooms.

So we spoke last year in Baku, and you'd give me a big pitch of you of what COP thirty would be.

You're here now, your COP president is going to start.

We all know this COP is going to be a little different.

It's ten years since the Paris Agreement was signed.

All the rules that needed to be agreed in the Paris Agreement that required negotiations, quite testing negotiations at times, they've all been done.

The one thing that COP thirty needed to achieve by the time countries even came here was to make sure that countries submit their climate plans.

You have spent a lot of your year trying to get countries to submit more climate plans, and yet so far only about sixty countries have done.

So why has it been so hard to convince countries to put forward their climate plans for twenty thirty five?

Yeah, this was not expected because the deadline, the original deadlines for the NDCs, which are those nationally determined contributions, was February.

But the truth is that countries have realized how complex it is to do a good NDC, and now that much more people are watching it and that you have the structures of some verification of support, etc.

Countries want to present NDCs that are credible and they have to negotiate inside the country to make sure that they are proposing something that is doable.

So we had lots of consultations in Brazil, but we did it in advance because we knew we were going to preside the cop and we had to represent our NDC and represented our NDC in Baku.

But I think it's very much linked to the fact that the NDCs are a very serious issue.

Now what do we do by having much less than we should?

First we have some consequences, is that the reports that we were supposed to receive from the NDCs that would have brought a more informed debate at the Cup, these reports could not be done the way they were supposed to.

But since this report which was presented, I think shows where we're going and tomorrow will have the gap report from a unipp that will also work on the numbers that are available, But it is true that it is something that was quite unexpected.

The numbers we do have, and there are some analysis have come with numbers, is that we are heading towards the world that is two point seven to point eight degrees celsius of warming.

The Paris Agreement goals are two degrees celsius, ideally one point five degrees celsius.

Now that gap has been reducing since the Paris Agreement, it was about four degrees celsius.

It has been falling, but that's that fall has now slowed down.

And one of the goals that you were hoping if these NDCs, if these climate plans had come in time, is that you would at COP thirty come up with a way to try and narrow that gap, to try and accelerate the speed of decline for that higher temperature end.

Given where we are right now, how do you think you're going to achieve that at COP thirty, Well, it's complex.

I think that there is a recognition of the necessity of lowering to the expectation to one point five.

But I think that you you mentioned something that is essential is that Paris worked because when we were negotiating Paris, who were going towards at least four degrees.

So Paris worked.

Now it didn't work in the way that was expected if you ask developing countries, is because there was not enough financing.

Because it's true that most of the renewable revolution, for instance, is happening in developed countries and in China, and there is an incredible potential in developing countries.

So the point of developing countries is quite logical.

If there was more financial resources, this revolution could have happened in other countries too.

Sometimes developed countries talk about ambition and things like that, but ambition we've seen from developing countries' point of view is ambition both in finance and in so the two things have to go together.

Now the cost is high, but the returns are enormous too.

We are seeing that China recognizes that a considerable part of its growth of its GDP has been linked to the agenda of combating climate change.

Many jobs also have been created thanks to that.

So we have a demonstration that this is something that works very well in a developing country.

And I believe that we end up coming back to finance as a key issue, which it is since we negotiated the Climate Change Convention nineteen ninety two.

So I want to come to finance, But let me come to one important topic before we come to finance.

So we know in the national climate plans, there are lots of plans that are differing speed different contexts.

Developing countries have different commitments in their climate plans.

Developed countries have different commitments.

But we also have some big goal goals that countries had set, like tripling renewables or stopping deforestation.

One of those goals, which was signed off at COP twenty eight in Dubai, was to start to phase out fossil fuels.

Now, none of the sixty climate plans that have been submitted so far have any language about stopping the production of fossil fuels.

You talked about China.

Now, China is a country that is clearly building what many call an electro state, a country that is exporting clean tech.

But even their own submission of a climate plan is much weaker than anybody expected.

We had Wukahukstra from EU saying no, they wanted China to reduce their emissions by twenty percent, maybe thirty percent by twenty thirty five, but the commitment is ten percent.

So what do you think you can do at COP thirty to try and get countries to start to phase out fossil fuels.

Yeah, it's very easy to have an opinion about the other countries.

So China has many opinions about the EU reduction of emissions also and about financial resources.

So I think that we have to concentrate on what the countries can really do among themselves.

And in fact, what we agreed in Dubai was to transition away from fossil fils.

That's the word thing that allowed the jest to be approved, and in Brazil's NDC we mentioned it.

In our NDC we say that we welcome a discussion on how we're going to do this transition away.

And the transition away is agreed by all, but it's going to be different according to each country, and that was something also that was in the presentation.

We're going to have different transitions, and I think that this is an extremely important debate.

How are we going to organize in each one of the countries this process.

Now, some countries have completely different circumstances.

So now we have, for instance, here in Brazil we have asked some think tanks and universities too to develop some ideas on how can we transition away, and we've also asked sectors of Brazil and economy to present their way of looking at how this transition can happen.

And I think this exercise is extraordinary and somehow that's why we have to trust and believe that these cops are useful.

I'm highly suspicious, obviously because I'm going to preside one.

But the fact is that if it was not for the cops, we would not have developed many of the technologies that we have now.

We would not know about so many things that we know and all these statistics that allow us to understand what we need to do, what we can do, and what we have still to invent, because unfortunately there are things in that direction too.

Join us after the break for more of my conversation with COP thirty president Andre Corea.

The logo and if you're enjoying this conversation so far, please take a moment to write a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Thank you.

So.

Coming to finance.

At COP twenty nine, there was a commitment to come up with a roadmap called the Baku tablean roadmap, and you're supposed to present that roadmap now.

Now, roadmap says.

It's a roadmap.

It's going to tell you what our idea is to try and unlock climate finance as much as one point three trillion dollars every year.

What should we expect in the roadmap that would be concrete, what that could convert into real money for developing countries.

Well, I wish I could give you a very exciting news that we found one point three trillion a year by twenty thirty five.

I believe that we have to understand better what is climate finance, to understand better the numbers, where it comes from, how it is used.

And so the roadmap that the Presidency of Coup twenty nine and the Presidency of Brazil are going to present, I believe, translate in a very straightforward way the difficulties that we may face.

And there are many things that we have to do.

But obviously there is no super bullet, so we have to work on many of the directions that we are already exploring.

The good news is that we are already exploring probably all the possibilities to get these resources.

The second thing is that we have to take the pandemic as a reference.

Nobody would think that we would be able to raise as much money that was possible for the pandemic in the time that this happened.

So there is money.

There is enough money.

And by the way, it's quite interesting because one of the numbers that was presented here is that the cost of climate change is already one point four trillion a year, so one point four one point three trillion, So it already costs one point four trillion.

So the numbers are there, the resources are there, but we really have to correct many things that may look small, but together they become a barrier to this finance objective.

But as we put it in the in the report, we are optimistic because it is possible.

So in that chart of one point four trillion, there's one big.

Blue one point three don't exaggerate.

In the dam chart, yes, on the one point four trillion dollars of annual climate damages, there was a big blue bar and that was the US, and that was about eight hundred billion dollars of climate damage in one year.

And we need to talk about the US.

You have been a diplomat all your life and it must be recognized what happened at the International Maritime Organization in October.

There was a meeting where countries were very confident that they'd worked on years to try and come to a global carbon tax on shipping.

They were confident that a majority of countries would vote on it.

And then we saw something that lots of diplomats have come to us and told us was extraordinary, something that they had never seen in a multilateral forum before, where the US first made public threats and then made private threats towards individuals to revoke their visas or put sanctions to tell them, if you vote for this proposal, you're going to be in trouble.

And that kind of bullying, as one expert put it, has lots of countries worried.

Now you are going to be at a COP where the US is still a part of the COP.

Right by next year they won't be, but right now they're officially a part of the COP.

What is your plan to deal with the US at COP, especially if they become so disruptive.

So you told me, I'm an experienced diplomat, and I'm a diplomat, and you want me to talk about the US, So okay, let me try well, I heard similar reports about the negotiation in London.

Yeah, it is.

Let's say that it is not the definition of diplomacy what happened there.

But I believe that at COP thirty we're going to have a different circums.

The US already announced it out and it's just waiting for the formality of waiting one year to live formally in January.

So I think it's different than the US acting in two negotiations that they believed were going to affect them.

As you know, the Paris Accord is much less binding than many of the other agreements, and so the US maybe believes that with the Paris Agreement, just leaving the Paris Agreement will solve the problem they have with the Paris Agreement.

But nevertheless, it was two very interesting negotiations, both Plastic and the IMO, because they showed in a very clear way how all these negotiations have become essentially economic.

So when people think of COP thirty as an environment to negotiation, it's because they haven't seen how it has evolved.

It touches so many sectors of the economy that countries really have to be very careful because no country in the world is ready for the transition, every country will have to sacrifice some sectors or will have to invest very heavily for changes.

So what you see is that somehow we are touching some nerves in the sense that these negotiations are reaching something because they are provoking a reaction.

That is some would say, not me, I'm a diplomat over reaction.

You say it is an economic conversation.

But if you and there have been analysis done of the global carbon tax on shipping, it would raise the price of somebody buying something at a supermarket by zero point one percent of the price.

Right, It's a very very small increase because shipping is only the transport cost of the good that is being brought to you.

And so it was less economic and clearly more ideolgical the battle that's being waged, so to speak, on the diplomacy front right now in the US.

So if it was economic, you could look at the charts that we just saw and you could make the case that clearly, rationally people should be acting for climate action.

But this is not about rationality.

Let me tell you, when we like two years ago, when we were discussing the IMO issue, we had some strong indications that it would increase significantly the cost of shipping for some Brazilian products because Brazil is an important exporter, but we're out of the usual routes, so we had the next onomic concern about it.

But we discussed, we said the problems that we had, et cetera, et cetera, and so the negotiation adjusted to incorporate the concerns of countries like Brazil.

That is what negotiations is about.

You you have to be careful because sometimes it will affect your country in a very negative way.

I think that there was I wouldn't call ideological.

I think it it is a reaction against the previous government that had a different perception of this, so they had they had no time to come back to the level of the negotiations before.

So I think that today I've been trying to I think many people agree that today you cannot anymore use, you know, fake scientific data to discuss claim change.

So now there is a new stage in the debates about climate change, which is the economic logic of the fight against climate change.

So the economic logic of this fight on investing in renewables, on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and so many other solutions, development of new technologies.

I think this is what is being debated.

And in every country in the world, the most conservative groups which are concerned about the negotiations are the most active groups with the governments because they are afraid to lose something.

And so somehow every country arrives at the COP very much influenced by the sectors of their economy that are more concerned.

So I think there is just an increase in lack of subtlety of some of the arguments.

So in this fracturing of geopolitics, one reason that you have articulated in the past, that President Lula has articulated is that you want COP thirty to be the showcase that multilateralism is still working.

One way, and this is a little technical part of COPP.

One way in which that is done is that towards the end, there is a statement, sometimes many pages of PDF long, that all countries sign off on, typically called a cover decision.

We've had a cover decision in Glasgow called the Glasgow pat and Charmel Shake, called the Shamalchak Implementation Plan.

One way in which you could show that multilateralism is working, that would be through showing countries making a commitment towards climate action through this cover decision?

Is that a tool that you're going to use?

If not, what tool?

Now?

It is a tool.

It's a legitimate tool because it's in the rules of the negotiation.

But in the more diplomatic Brazilian tradition, we praise transparency above everything.

So there are some actors that are telling us we need to cover decision, etc.

I prefer to try to use the negotiations that we have already included in the agenda and try to find the place for all these concerns in the decisions that are going to be negotiated.

Now, there may be a movement of countries, of a very large number of countries that say, look, we are in a situation that only a covered decision can solve the situation.

So I don't know if we are going to reach that moment, but I believe that for the moment, I prefer not to work with the idea that in the last minute we're going to come with something.

Let's try to work with the elements we have in the most transparent possible way.

I think that we can reach a good result that way.

But let's see, because you know, all cops are a bit strange, and I think that this one will also be a little.

Last question for you.

So cop over the years have grown in size, but also in importance and in attention that they gathered from the world.

One of the ways they gather that attention is there's a headline at the end saying this is what we achieved.

You are now saying there are many things that we've achieved.

This is about actually implementing them.

But you want the leaders who will be coming here to Brazil to go back home and say why it is worthy of still working on the paras agleement.

What is it that you think they can get from this cop and what is the message that you would hope leaders would take back to their own countries.

Well, as you said, cops have grown enormously and cops have a huge impact on the economy, on social issues, on so many themes.

So it's very difficult to imagine one thing at the COP that would please everybody.

The other thing is that many times conferences like that you only see the real impact of the results after a certain time.

All these things that I'm saying is to be a diplomatic and say that I don't know what I want at the end of the coup.

But the point is that we indeed many results of the coup because we have many layers at the COP that we have to satisfy.

I mean, we need business to be satisfied, science to be satisfied, civil society to be satisfied, developed countries to be satisfied, developing countries to be satisfied.

So I think that this is what makes a successful COP is when you have united people and not when you have achieved one result that is appreciated by one sector more than others.

It's a very difficult balance.

It's a very difficult balance.

But we've been listening to countries.

We've been listening to civil society, to science, to business, and I hope that we are going to be able to have a COP that brings true results to all of them because I think that this is what is going to bring back trust in multilateralisms, is not the capacity of having an agreement in the last minute on something that people didn't have so much time to read.

So let's try to do it.

Because again I think that we have to convince people that it's worthwhile to continue to negotiate climate and convince people, also that we have negotiated enough to act.

Thank you and good luck.

Thank you, I need that.

Thank you for listening to zero.

If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd with additional help from Anna Mazarakis.

Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Samarsadi, Moses Andam Laura Milan and Sharon chan i'm Akshadrati back soon.