We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

When you have to go and do things, then it starts to affect real people making real decisions and suddenly having to pay for things, then everyone's got an opinion.

What I would argue on the loss and damage case is that a lot of the progress that we have seen is fairly thin, fairly shallow, and in some instances quite performative.

We cannot succeed with our solidarity at an international level.

We don't have this solidarity.

This is really missing.

This is generation one from University College London, turning climate science and ideas into action.

Welcome back to UCL's generation one podcast and episode 11 of season five.

I'm your host, Mark Maslin, Professor of earth system Science here at UCL, which means I study climate change in the past, the present, and the future.

This episode is unusual in that I'm here at UCL at a special event with the French Embassy in London marking ten years from the signing of the Paris Agreement.

We will be hearing from a brilliant panel of experts, including diplomats, policymakers, and academics who will be looking back at the significance of the Paris agreement and how it is looking in the light of the current geopolitical situation.

Now I'm without my usual cohost, the brilliant Simon Chin Yee, who is representing UCL at COP thirty in Brazil.

But please check on his socials because he is posting brilliant little videos almost every day.

Instead, I am joined backstage here by my wonderful colleague, professor Lisa Vanhala , who has helped to organize this amazing event.

Lisa, it is lovely that you can join me on this podcast today and to introduce the event and speakers.

So welcome, Lisa.

Thank you, Mark.

I'm so excited to be here and to be stepping in for Simon.

Frankly, I'm a little jealous of Simon usually when I listen to the podcast,

so I'm really, really excited to be here with you today.

Well, I'm sure Simon is missing us as well.

But in the absence of Simon and to keep up our warm tradition, Lisa, I have to ask you about topical climate stories.

What's been keeping you busy recently?

Yeah.

Great.

There's a lot going on because of COP thirty, of course.

But I had my book launch last week, which was really exciting.

We launched my new book called Governing the End, The Making of Climate Change, Loss and Damage.

And then you and I were both also at the book launch of Susannah Fisher's Sink or Swim, which is looking, I think, a really accessible way at adaptation policy, which of course is a huge topic at COP thirty this year.

So there's a lot going on and and a lot that's really topical to be talking about, and we're really looking forward to this panel today to to be thinking in the round about all of these issues related to climate governance.

For me, it always amazes me how much incredible work goes on at UCL.

And to have two book launches, one after the other, was brilliant and by two of our incredible sort of, like, female colleagues.

Now, Lisa, tell us briefly about who's behind this event and why you've organized it.

Right.

So you'll be aware that in our grand challenge of the climate crisis, one of our key strategic themes is really thinking about climate governance.

One of the things that we talk about in terms of barriers to kind of more ambition and more climate action is a lack of political will.

And what we're starting to do with colleagues across UCL altogether, and there've been a lot of people who've been thinking about this for a long time, we're really trying to to unpack what does political will mean.

Is this about countries' interests?

Is it institutions that are blocking it?

Is it about the kind of political party politics?

Is it about the structures within each country?

Is it about kind of geopolitical dynamics?

So what we've tried to do for this event is pull together a number of different institutes at UCL and that have been thinking about this, including our Grand Challenge of the Climate Crisis, the European Institute, the UCL Centre for Law and the Environment.

And we've worked together with the research and innovation department of the French Embassy in The UK to bring together a wide range of colleagues to think about these issues related to climate governance.

The event is really marking, in some ways, this ten years since the historic signing of the Paris Agreement, and that was really a kind of unique moment in the history of multilateralism.

Adopted by a 195 countries in 2015, the Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that's really aiming to hold the increase in the global average temperature to, you know, well below two degrees above pre industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels.

And that 1.5 degrees Celsius point is really, really important for a lot of countries, and so that's something we'll be talking about today.

I have to say it's an amazing lineup of guests, and I'm going to do a bit of a drum roll because this is amazing.

Can you introduce the first speaker?

Yeah.

We're really, really delighted that providing some opening remarks will be Her Excellency, Helene Treheux Duchene, who is the French Ambassador to The United Kingdom, and we're just really delighted to have her here.

The ambassador has been a good friend to UCL.

UCL has a number of partnerships with French institutions, and we do a lot of work with the French Embassy.

And so we're really delighted that she could join us today.

Lisa, thank you so much, and it is always wonderful to have you.

I'm sure Simon will be really worried about his job now, but I also know you need to rush off and actually organize the event.

So thank you so much, Lisa.

Thanks so much.

The Paris Agreement is watching.

Of course, there is still a long way to go, but it's fair to say that we have avoided the worst scenario, which would have made human life almost practically impossible.

So I think there is hope.

Every year, representatives of 200 states meet for the COPs, negotiate, and eventually agree compromises.

We know that the COPs system is not perfect.

We know that The US is pulling out of the Paris Agreement for the second time.

But then nevertheless, the world goes back every year to the negotiating table and fights for a better future.

So I think one of the main lessons of these past ten years is that if we act together, we can make it work.

In Belem, France and The UK will keep leading by example with a few shared priorities.

So before I hand over to the panel, I want to stress that there is no better place to discuss climate change than this university.

A time where science is under attack, your presence tonight shows that there is importance of having an informed public debate on the democratic society, and we are there for the police to lie.

So let's keep this speech alive.

So those were opening remarks by the ambassador.

We now are going to bring you the highlights of the great debate that was chaired by professor Eloise Scotford, Dean of the Faculty of Law here at UCL.

The panel includes Adam Berman, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Energy UK, Doctor Pedro Schilling de Caarvalho, Assistant Professor of Finance and Environmental Law, Dan Bradley, Head of climate and environment at the UK Mission to the EU, Professor Jean Jouzel, Emeritus Research Director at the CEA and member of the Academy of Science, and our very own professor Lisa Vanhala Professor of Political Science and Pro Vice Provost for the UCL Climate Crisis Grand Challenge.

Welcome everybody to UCL and to Bentham House and to the Faculty of Laws.

I'm the Dean of the Faculty.

It's my absolute pleasure to welcome you and to have such esteemed company, not just to I think it really elevates the evening and signifies how important the topics that we are discussing and that there's international interest, but a strong spirit of international cooperation and collaboration in looking at some of the quite difficult issues that we're going to discuss this evening.

So I am going to try and get us into some questions.

The first is we're just gonna tackle the kind of elephant in the space head on, which is we are in a very complex geopolitical moment today for multilateralism.

And we're talking about the Paris Agreement, which was the high point of multilateral agreement on a very difficult topic.

So considering that we are in this the moment that we're in today, we're thinking about ten years since the Paris Agreement and the significant broader geopolitical challenges for multilateralism and the ambassador mentioned The US pulling out of the Paris Agreement for the second time, how do the panellists feel about international climate policymaking, and in particular the Paris Agreement, encountering this moment of kind of turbulence in multilateral policymaking?

That's quite an open question, but it's an invitation to get the issues that are kind of obvious in the world on the table in relation to the Paris Agreement.

Over to you, Dan.

I think you sort of set the ball rolling in right way.

Think multilateralism really is under pressure.

That's for sure.

I mean, of geopolitical shifts, lots of economic pressures, the rise of populism.

We're

sort

of having to go back to arguments we thought we'd won, I think quite a long time ago, and that's sort of disappointing that we seem to have, know, facts seem to be unfashionable at the moment, sadly.

But you need to tell a good story around that and you need to try and make the case again.

And I think in a way that's a natural moment when you start to get into doing the hard yards of delivery, because we're not just now in doing the big political targets and showing our mission, we actually have to go and do stuff now.

And when you have to go and do things that starts to affect real people making real decisions and suddenly having to pay for things, then everyone's got an opinion, And rightly so, and that's a very natural part of the delivery phase.

So it's under pressure, it's more complex, it's more fragmented politically.

We don't see the same sort of driving wave of conviction, I think, behind the climate project in quite the same way.

There's still a lot of inertia in the system as well around vested interest in fossil fuels and so on, we have to manage.

And then we have really unhelpful things like conflicts bursting around the world, which has actually a complex effect.

Mean, I sit in Brussels, we're seeing the EU really have a lot of conviction around the idea that they really need to accelerate the transition to renewables because they want to get off Russian gas.

So you're seeing this almost unintended consequence in conflict, but at the same time, it's a huge distraction away from doing useful things.

So lots of multilateralism under pressure.

But despite that pressure, I would say from The UK side, we are really pushing hard to keep multilateralism alive and not least in the context of UNFCCC and COP, because you might have heard the Secretary of State for Energy Security in Net Zero over the weekend saying that Paris and the COP process is an unprecedented experiment in accountability.

And I think that's a really good mindful thing to think about.

So as the ambassador said, Paris is working.

And it is an unprecedented set of people that have actually come together behind a unified goal and are trying to make it work.

But of course it's messy and complicated and often when I particularly when I talk to students, there's this sense that things aren't the progress is glacial.

But I think for me, what looks glacial to you in a multilateral context can be actually moving at the speed of light.

It really is like that.

It's a highly, highly complex thing to get 198 countries to agree on stuff when they're coming from very different trajectories and trying to achieve very different things.

And you do have to put this in context behind some of the very, very difficult problems they are trying to solve, and how we can weave a really compelling story that says, you know what, clean transition is a toolkit for you to achieve some of the goals that you're trying to achieve economically, socially, lifting people out of poverty, trying to improve people's quality of life, trying to actually look after the ecosystem services that we depend upon.

You have to try and look at what people are trying to achieve and attach your story to that.

So it's difficult, it's messy, but it's very necessary.

The benefits absolutely outweigh the challenges.

So it's worth riding out a turbulence.

I think that is the message I would give.

And I think the final point I would say is sometimes challenge can breed camaraderie.

So the messages I heard coming out of pre COP was wow, actually people came in a really collaborative mood, even China.

And that may be because China's actually quite interested in occupying the space that The US has left at the moment, but that idea that sometimes when you're in quite a difficult situation, people say, this is too crazy, we actually have to work together on this.

And my frame of reference for that is during Trump's first term, I was based in New Delhi, and I started getting lots and lots of phone calls when The US pulled out saying, do you think India will now go slow?

And my prediction was no, I don't think they will, honestly.

And they then came out very quickly to say, we don't do things because somebody else does.

We don't do things because people tell us to.

We are absolutely behind this agenda because it's just a good idea.

Okay.

That's a really good opening up.

It is all about selling a story of things that are better.

Because if climate action is about something that is selfless with limited co benefits other than unfortunately a more livable planet, If your home is not warmer, if your bills are not cheaper, if you don't have access to better jobs and more productive economy, whatever it may be, it is exceptionally hard to drive that narrative at domestic level.

And so I think what really helps and I come from the kind of private sector side, what helps so much is when the market moves in the direction so that you are able to make these arguments because the technologies are cheaper, They are better.

And yes, they happen to also be cleaner.

And so, you know, if you look, the ambassador talks about solar prices, solar prices have decreased by about 90% over the last decade.

That is not true of all clean energy.

It's not true of all clean technologies.

However, we are seeing generally that they are coming down the cost curve.

And I think as evidence of the economic potential of those technologies and why countries should just be adopting them because it's the best thing to do for them as a as a selfish nation state.

It is the best thing for them to do.

And I think the the best example of that is China at the moment that has seen remarkable growth in what we would call in The UK a sort of low carbon economy, essentially a a kind of a massive renaissance in industrial development around the export of clean technologies, such that I drive a Chinese EV because it's good and it is markedly cheaper than all of the European ones.

Sorry to those European car producers.

It's same thing with the Chinese solar and batteries.

Now, we can have a conversation about trade offs here, what we wanna have domestically, what we wanna have in other countries, but ultimately the opportunities are there for the taking.

And I think at times it can seem like certain countries are just fighting the good fight for climate and no one else is doing anything.

And actually what I think is fantastic now is that the market is broadly pushing in the right direction.

And actually we have the Paris Agreement to thank for that, which set the framework that the markets have used to operate.

I think maybe just one other point, which is in order to be able to prove the case, order to be able to get people excited about this transition that they are doing it for, yes, for good reasons about decarbonization, but also for selfish reasons, because that's often how we get people to act, is it is about getting the Paris Agreement to work properly for everyone.

And there's still lots of areas in the Paris Agreement that we can really exploit.

And so one thing, for example, I used to work on the international side on something called Article six of the Paris Agreement, which is a mechanism essentially for kind of carbon trading, which sounds very dull, but it's also very important.

Imagine you're in this predicament, you are Switzerland and you need to decarbonize your road transport system.

It's actually quite difficult.

It's quite expensive.

I'm thinking it's gonna take longer than within my NDC.

What am I gonna do?

Perhaps I could come up with a really rigorous structure, you know, moderated and adjudicated by the UNFCCC with rigorous rules saying, actually, I'm gonna go to Botswana and I'm gonna say, can I pay you to do the same emissions reduction?

And I will essentially transfer the responsibility from one to another.

It's all done in the big UN database, and we can come out with actually a better result.

And so it's a proper kind of international solution to a global problem.

Okay.

So far, we've got a vote for camaraderie and a vote for self interest.

I think that's just great.

So Jean, how would you approach this question?

Yes, sure.

I was in, I was involved in this meeting.

So it's clear also that if you look at scientific viewpoint, the Paris Agreement, okay, I was relatively optimistic after the Paris Agreement and clearly, with respect to your question, the problem is clearly the climate skepticism of Donald Trump and US.

It's clear.

So what is weakening the Paris Agreement is this one.

No.

We can look at what is occurring over the the recent months, I mean, when you look at the shipping agreement, it's clear that Donald Trump is going to say, okay, I don't want this.

Okay.

When you look at the, I am in this business of over more than fifty, probably fifty years.

So when I look at, clearly, I mean, the Kyoto agreement failed because of the fact that The US was not involved.

I mean, they said, do not ratify.

This was revolution.

We are in the same situation.

No, this is clearly.

But come to Europe, are, we, so Dan, you mentioned, okay, there is a position to occupy.

I would have dreamed that this position would be occupied by Europe, not by China.

This was my dream.

I was, I mean, am also very much involved in the European issue.

But it's clear, we are not sufficiently ambitious in Europe for me.

So, okay, so this ambition is not here because we can discuss populism and the climate skepticism.

But it's clear that when you look at multilateralism, it's important, I mean, it's so key that all nations should be involved in this Paris Agreement or anyway, climate issue generally.

So we are not here.

So this is, we cannot succeed with our solidarity at an international level, and we don't have this solidarity.

This is really missing.

Pedro?

I think we're in a bit of a paradox moment where we're seeing the limitations of Paris and COP become a bit more apparent, but at the same time we're seeing resilience in line with what Adam I think was highlighting.

So even before Trump, we were seeing other fora emerge as very relevant for discussions on climate finance.

So during the Biden years, the IMF and World Bank annual or spring meetings became sort of a spot for negotiations on climate finance, largely because you had sort of the finance ministers and the correct stakeholders there, sometimes more than some of the cops.

You had some difficulties arising from the cops with presidencies that couldn't quite always keep momentum on some of the climate finance discussions.

And now it really looks like we're approaching another moment where sort of mini lateral or bilateral engagement, so the formation of smaller coalitions of countries that might have common goals or common agendas, is looking more likely to yield results which can then be amplified by the COP or by Paris.

So I think if we already talk COP thirty later on, the first announcement at COP thirty, the TFFF tropical forest river facility, rolls off the tongue.

But it was negotiated outside of COP via a combination of global South and global North countries, some very traditional international financial institutions, but announced at COP to try to amplify sort of what it's actually doing.

So very interesting developments, if nothing else, in a moment where everything seems very bleak.

Thank you, Patrick.

And finally, Lisa.

Yeah.

Great.

The the beautiful part of being at the end of the panel is a lot of what I was gonna say is already covered, and and so I'm not gonna say anything more about the gentleman sitting in the White House.

What I would maybe like to speak to, which I think hasn't hasn't really been addressed here yet, is when we're understanding this geopolitical moment, I I think there are two elements we wanna consider.

The UN, of course, is 80 this year, and and that hasn't gotten a lot of attention or been talked about kind of more generally.

It's also facing a kind of liquidity crisis.

A number of member states are failing to pay their contributions in full and on time, and this is having really profound impacts that I think, you know, aren't aren't really looked at.

And I think the second point when we're thinking about this geopolitical moment that tends to get a little bit overlooked, of course, is the turbulence caused by climate change impacts.

So, you know, these impacts are having kind of huge impact on states' capacities to even engage with the climate crisis.

And and, of course, the paradox is that climate change is is eroding those capacities.

And so that's something I think that I wanna think about when we think about these questions in terms of geopolitical crisis.

And and then to address this this issue of eroding states' capacities because of climate impacts, this year is gonna be really important with the global goal on adaptation in Balaam.

But, really, the focus there, what we can be doing to confront this moment is thinking about how can we support and strengthen states' capacities to live on a warming planet.

Very good.

Okay.

So what we're gonna do now is think a little bit about the Paris Agreement and its impact.

What's happened in the last ten years?

I'm gonna turn now to Dan to see what you think about the impact of the Paris Agreement, and we'll move to the future after this question.

Sure.

No, happy to talk about it, because I just don't think we actually talk about the success stories enough.

And if you just read headlines, you could just really wake up and think, you know, is it worth it?

Under the Paris Agreement, we've seen two thirds of the global economy that has now peaked emissions or is committed to peak within the next few years.

You're seeing incredible things you said in China.

I mean, let's really just celebrate what China's doing to drive the clean transition.

The US is more than who sits in the White House.

There is a lot of activity.

I mean, at what California is doing, look at what city mayors are doing to drive change, look at what the business community is doing in The US.

So let's not just sort of throw that away.

In The UK, which I know the best, we have cut emissions by 54% while growing our economy by two thirds.

And I say that not to sort of say, hey, we're amazing, but to say that shows you that you can have clean growth.

It is just so fake to set up this polarized, completely fake argument.

It's either green or it's growth.

And my evidence for that is that, you know, we are really seeing this economic phenomenon now in The UK, where last year our net zero economy grew by 10%.

That's against the backdrop where our GDP growth is about 0.4%.

So look how much faster the net zero economy is growing compared to the traditional economy.

But let's at least go further and faster off a sort of positive platform of the fact that there is a lot, a lot's happening, and that has been a forcing mechanism from the Paris Agreement to get there.

Because I see a lot of anxiety, particularly amongst people who are my kids age 18 and 21.

And all I would say is the best antidote to anxiety is action.

Fantastic.

Now what I'm going do is I'm going to keep following your lead, Dan.

I'm going go to Adam down to The UK level and then come back up to the international level.

And I want to pick up a couple of things you said.

We're in a net zero paradigm, which I think is your world, Adam.

And I heard all the facts, and they were all terrific.

So there is that story, but there's another story.

And I wonder if you could probably help the audience understand how we put all these pieces together in the context of thinking about the Paris Agreement as it's felt in a domestic economy.

Yeah.

Of course.

Or might abandon it.

So look, I think zero and climate action is a bit like democracy is that every new generation, basically every new day, you have to fight for it again and again and again, because the same people, the same problems come up.

And The UK, I think is probably at the forefront of that because we are at the forefront of decarbonization.

We have reduced emissions by over half since 1990.

Most of that in the last ten years since the Paris Agreement.

You know, if you particularly in the students in the room, if you were a student in The UK, what's, let's say in 1990, the electricity from your socket was, I'm trying think what it is now, it's about four fifths fewer emissions than in 1990.

That is invisible.

But I think that speaks to one of the kind of inherent problems within net zero within climate action generally is that there's a decent chunk of emissions that are pretty invisible to the population.

And then as you start pushing forty, fifty, 60% of emissions reductions, they become more visible and they become more tangible in people's everyday lives.

It's about those I represent coming into your homes and putting in a heat pump rather than a boiler.

It's about having an EV.

It's about, you know, changing, I don't know, your diet or your travel patterns, whatever it may be.

And I think The UK is at the forefront of what it is like to be an economy where climate action is becoming more political and it is touching people's everyday lives.

And that is a challenge.

I think it is one that we're doing quite well at despite all of the politics, troubling.

Which You know, we are at the point where essentially climate was really popular for a while.

Climate was quite sexy politically for a long time.

We're now at the point where that is not the case and it is much harder to find consensus.

But I think that is also why to come back to my point, original point is why, yes, I'm absolutely not dismissing arguments about multilateralism.

Yes, of course, we need to work with others.

Yes, of course, we need to think about what is best for this planet.

However, at the domestic political level, what I see time and time and time and time again is that polls will bear out that actually climate action has very strong support in the British population.

But once you start to get into the granular things that people need to do to effect change, it becomes much more incumbent on problems like cost of living that are being addressed before you can actually get to more selfless, what might be perceived as more selfless actions.

Those two things aren't impossible to do hand in hand and actually to give to give the current government some credit.

They are looking at, for example, how to decarbonize buildings and they have this big plan behind it.

And what they really wanna do is put in the forms of heating, put in the forms of electricity generation on your roof that are going to bring down your bills.

So yes, this is about decarbonization, but really it it is about your living standards.

And maybe just to link it to the back to the Paris Agreement, the reason that we have been able to do that is that the Paris Agreement puts in place a structure that gave industry this really annoying word that everyone in industry uses, which is certainty.

It gave them a framework which said, unlike any other area where governments come and go, particularly in democratic states, governments come and go, policies change, you can be sure that if you invest in this today, we're still gonna be interested in in thirty years' time.

That is certainty that is not true anywhere else.

Any other area.

That's a very good headline on the impact of the Paris Agreement.

Now I'm gonna thank you.

I'm gonna turn to Pedro, and to take really serious back up to climate finance at the international level, take seriously the question, what do you think the impact of Paris Agreement has been in the climate finance space, and does it align with the Paris goals?

Because they're a bit of it I'm being a bit challenging as a chair.

But are people just getting rich?

Rich people getting richer through climate finance mechanisms?

Or is it actually is it is it driving change?

Right.

I think starting on the easier question, which is, you know, the impacts of the Paris agreements.

It really depends on the expectations you had to start with.

So I'm I'm someone that came from the implementation side, from the domestic side, so I never imagined that an international treaty would solve finance magically.

So it's one of the topics that has very clear distributive consequences.

It's complex in terms of how you will personalize it.

So developments from recent years, the stalemates in the new collective quantified goal on climate finance, the targets that high income countries have in terms of contributing to climate finance, or the current state of the Baku to Galem roadmap, they're not surprising in my view.

You would always have negotiations in relation to those topics in line I think with what Jean mentions, and it's positive that we have fora for those.

Having said that, I think the impact is mostly positive.

The sort of problem here is objectively speaking, we're in a more challenging context, where we have less public finance.

High income countries are cutting down overseas development assistance, they are cutting some climate commitments, and the ability to attract private finance in a way that generates positive impacts is hard, especially for middle and low income countries.

Then here what's a bit to come to the final points about the you know are we making rich people richer?

We were getting better at not necessarily doing that.

And I still have a slightly optimistic, I think, take in terms of we are getting better at understanding what can be effectively deployed and trying to curb some of the moral hazards that you've you've mentioned.

Lisa?

Yeah.

Great.

I wanted to speak a little bit on loss and damage, which is my area of expertise.

And it wasn't at all a foregone conclusion in Paris that loss and damage would even be mentioned.

And so this was one of the really thorny issues at the beginning of the Paris negotiations with some countries not wanting loss and damage even referred to.

And for developing countries, it was really considered a red line.

So in a lot of ways, the fact that it was in introduced, it has its own article, article eight of the Paris Agreement, was really a kind of triumph, I would say, of French diplomacy that you know, to to get kind of parties to come together on that issue.

This article on loss and damage was nonetheless kind of caveated a little bit in the decision accompanying the Paris Agreement in article 52, I think, where it says article eight does not provide does not serve as a basis for liability and compensation.

Right?

And that was really important.

That has come come to play a really important role.

But what we have seen since Paris is, I think, a lot of institution building around loss and damage within the UNF triple c.

So you already had a executive committee working on loss and damage before the Paris agreement, but you had a new task force on displacement.

You had other expert groups kind of set up working on comprehensive risk management on noneconomic losses on how to support countries to respond to slow onset events.

We had the establishment in 2019 of a Santiago network for loss and damage, which is really about providing technical expertise to the most developing the most vulnerable countries.

And then, of course, in 2023, you will have seen all these headlines around the agreement and establishment of a new fund for responding to loss and damage.

And so, you know, what I what I would argue is that we've seen a lot of kind of building of new institutions, establishment of a new fund.

In a lot of ways, this looks like global governance par excellence.

What I argue, and I'm gonna shamelessly plug right now my new book, governing the end, the making of climate change, loss, and damage.

What I argue in this book is that actually a lot of these institutions are a much thinner version of what we might like to see if we were really taking this problem really seriously as an international community.

What I try and do is look really carefully at what happens to these agreements in COP that get a lot of attention once the negotiators go home.

And when the bureaucrats and the kind of mid level diplomats working on these committees and in these organizations, what happens to these agreements and kind of how they are eroded and delay is introduced and money isn't provided.

And so, you know, what I would argue on the loss and damage case is that a lot of the progress that we have seen is fairly fairly thin, fairly shallow, and in some instances, quite performative.

Okay.

So high again.

Got so many positives, so many negatives.

Can tell with a problem like climate change, we often think of as an environmental problem.

It's the law of everything, and that's why this panel is struggling to cover these questions in the limited time available.

So what I'm gonna ask the panel to do is one more contribution from you each before we go to questions, and it's a looking forwards question.

I'll start with you, Lisa, and we'll work back.

Yeah.

That's great.

I wanna speak, I suppose, a little bit to this question about national implementation and what we can and should be doing here.

And and focusing specifically on this issue of climate change adaptation, The UK's climate change committee's 2025 report to parliament was really crystal clear that The UK's preparations for climate change are inadequate.

Inadequate.

Right?

Progress is too slow.

It has stalled, or it is heading in the wrong direction.

And so I think one of the really big challenges that we're facing at the national level is how can we improve coordination across government, and how can we integrate adaptation into all relevant policies.

Great.

Thank you, Lisa.

Coordination, adaptation.

I'm gonna keep our list.

Yes.

Pedro.

I'll speak a little bit more about what I've mentioned in the first question, which is the the Tropical Forest Forever Fund.

Again, horrible acronym.

They they should change it.

I think that the key change here is that so this is basically a new fund that is not being framed as foreign aid, but rather as an investment opportunity.

To have a vehicle that's expected to generate returns, that will deliver value to some investors, but rewards global South countries for basically preserving their forests, which is more tractable than other things in climate finance.

And there are some key differences that are, I think, make it at least interesting.

So it has developing countries as both investors and beneficiaries.

It can sort of leverage private investments in a more robust way, in theory at least, than some of the foreign aids and so on and so forth.

So naturally, with all announcements that come from a cop, the devil is very much in the details and how it's going to implement it.

But the fact that this is sort of a self self cooperation that is bringing a much more interesting proposition in terms of leverage factors is exciting, if nothing else.

And it was launched on the first day, 5,500,000,000.0 on first day commitments, again from governments, including global North countries, Norway, France, Portugal, The Netherlands, and some global South countries like Brazil and Indonesia.

To maybe tie it off with, you know, that's the short term, how it connects with the challenges and the obstacles.

Especially in finance we're really seeing that the national level matters a lot and we really need you know good reporting frameworks.

We need the sort of right enabling environments to make sure that stuff actually causes positive impacts.

We are generally making progress there, but I would highlight that there's a very, very big gap in technical capacity between especially global North and global South countries, which we probably don't pay attention to as much as we we need.

And that's ultimately, especially considering that most of the relevant assets that needs to be preserved are in the global South, needs to be sort of fixed, and maybe some of those self self initiatives can point a way forward.

Jean?

So, okay.

I want to keep some optimism, simply speaking.

It's it's very difficult even if the international situation is not ideal.

My my hope is that the commitments will be such that we still keep the hope to come back to Tulle De Grissie before the end of the century.

This is very important.

We should keep, I mean, obviously, we cannot escape to this transition.

It's clear.

We we cannot escape to to net zero because otherwise it's accept we should not accept that climate will warm indefinitely.

And it's clear, so we should do it and we should keep really this two w c objective alive.

And this is possible if the commitments are really, I mean, not somewhat ambitious in Belem.

They are not so bad, not sufficient, but it's clear that some effort has been done by countries.

Not sufficient, but again, I would like to keep some optimism about the commitments.

So maybe just on the mitigation side, of at national level, to make a slightly controversial statement, I think governments around the world and the UK government included should stop trying to solve every problem through the mechanism of climate policy, because I think it just tends to slow things down.

And I think when a a country like UK, for example, is looking at how to be a leader in climate action.

That leader include leadership includes coming up with policies that are cheap to implement and are relatively popular and can come up with results quickly.

And so actually to to use one successful example, maybe to slightly fly in the face of the are some of these policies just making rich people richer?

EVs, right?

If you're taking a kind of socioeconomic lens to how am I gonna help people get into EVs because essentially I need to decarbonize my transport.

It's a huge chunk of any natural emissions.

So whether it's EVs or it's, you know, electric, most cycles, etcetera, you need to get people in them.

And that socioeconomic lens would say, alright, I should really prioritize low income households, vulnerable households first with something tapered that gets less generous over time and it gets generous as you go up the income scale.

From an economic perspective, you need to do exactly the opposite.

You need to subsidize middle class households to get things that they might have the money to buy themselves, but they're probably not going to.

Because in getting scale, you can get things cheaper and you can make sure every low income household can get one without needing a massive subsidy from any nation state.

And to give credit to UK government and other governments, they have taken that approach.

And it's very easy to throw stones from the outside and say, well, you're just giving money to middle class households.

No.

What they're doing is making it cheaper for every household.

And so I think that's a lesson we need to learn.

Okay, Dan, that's a nice open invitation for you to bring this home.

Opportunities, challenges?

Bring it home.

Costs on climate.

I think we don't have a technical problem, we have a communications problem.

And I think we need to win that back.

And I think one of the ways to win that back from opportunity is just to really sell the benefits to economy, security, human health, and well-being.

Those are real things that I think matter to all of us.

And the fact that the action you actually need to take to solve the climate problem are actually addressing those three areas as well.

And those are real, real things.

In terms of where we might get to at the end of the the Belleng conference, I'm going start with nature because I don't think we talk about it enough.

With The UK, we really link the nature and climate crisis.

You think it's part of the same problem.

We don't talk about nature enough.

So we'll be really pushing on how we better steward forests, oceans, and biodiversity.

Some stuff together with France, we saw a great announcement around the Congo Basin, call to action in Belen.

That's really important to us.

We need to really get serious about what we do about forests.

The second thing that people don't talk about enough is adaptation and resilience.

We really want to push on adaptation and resilience, get some real progress on the metrics around the global goal and adaptation, try and take adaptation finance seriously.

Less developed countries want this to be the adaptation cop.

They want to have something come out of this on adaptation, so let's really try and get behind that.

And then there's three other things that I'd really like to see come out.

One is just really getting back some momentum on speeding up the clean energy transition.

I feel we really were getting there with language very, very close to even phasing out coal.

We've got phasing down coal, and glad they didn't quite get a phase out, made Alekshawn cry.

We made progress on it, but let's really try and pick up that clean energy transition and just try and get that going much, much faster.

And The UK is leading a global clean power alliance to try and do real things in real places and harmonize global action around those.

Final two, scaling finance from all sources, just trying to keep the pressure on that.

Let's keep ourselves honest on trying to get to finance at the scale that we need.

We are a green finance capital in The UK, so as part of that push, it's really looking to see how we can unlock private investment.

Because let's be real, there is no public money in the world that can pay for the climate action.

It's not to let us off the hook.

We need to absolutely step up to the plate and do what we committed to do.

Then you cannot get to trillions, which is what you need, without private capital.

So that's something that we're to put that bulletproofing behind.

And then the final thing is just still this idea of keeping 1.5 within reach.

It's a totemic, very politically important number.

We're not ready to give up 1.5 just yet.

You will see us still talk about that.

But I think we need a new narrative around one one point five.

And I think, I mean, John's the expert, and I would just really echo his points to finish with that every tenth of the degree matters.

So let's not feel that we're bumping up against 1.5 now.

Is there any point?

Yes, there is a point because every 0.1 degree makes a difference to people's lives and to the things upon which we all depend.

So every 0.1 degree is worth fighting.

But I really wanna thank the panel who not only have taken time out of their very busy lives, but also did quite a lot of preparation for this evening for which we're very grateful.

So can we give the panel, please, a round?

That's it for this special episode of generation one from UCL, turning climate science and ideas into action.

If you'd like to ask us a question or suggest a guess that you would like to hear on generation one, you can email us at podcasts, with ans@ucl.ac.uk.

Otherwise, for more information about UCL's work in the climate space, head to UCL's climate website and follow us on social media hashtag u c l generation one.