With 2024 on track to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the key threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming as measured on an annual basis, the challenges facing humanity were on clear display at the recent United Nations climate conference, COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

In that sobering atmosphere, delegates of the Bahá’í International Community (BIC) sought to advance discussions on how an honest assessment of the difficulties facing humanity can prompt movement toward more constructive patterns of interaction and engagement. The BIC’s delegates shared that constructive engagement can supplant widespread despair and recrimination often seen at COP conferences and in similar international forums.

Reflecting on his time at the COP29 conference, BIC Representative Daniel Perell said “current approaches are not inspiring the actions necessary at this moment in history”, adding that “a climate governance framework negotiated through norms of division and opposition, return on investment, control, and competitive advantage, undermines the collaboration and unity  humanity needs to address the planetary nature of the crisis. This is now irrefutable. We desperately need to find a different approach.”

The BIC explored such approaches, both in content and in practice, through a side event co-hosted with the government of Vanuatu. Focused on assessing lessons learned around an emerging climate loss and damage fund, the event was structured in the form of a traditional Pacific “tok stori” gathering—a community conversation drawing heavily on storytelling, common across several Pacific cultures. 

The event promoted informal dialogue and the sharing of expertise and experience instead of asserting pre-formulated positions. But the start of the event was delayed as conference organizers debated whether sitting in a circle was even permitted. 

“It was a small thing, but perhaps illustrative of wider challenges that we need to overcome,” Mr. Perell said of the experience. “Like many other venues of this kind, the space for side events was optimized for a few featured speakers and many passive attendees; we needed to get creative to accommodate a group of people sitting in a circle, consulting on equal terms.” 

“Unfortunately, entrenched assumptions, processes, and norms hinder efforts to find more innovative and collaborative means of addressing global challenges.”

Once the methodology was agreed, Mr. Perell added, the event was refreshing.

One young participant at the meeting said it was “the best event I’ve attended all week. We were able to have an actual conversation.” A former president who also attended, meanwhile, said that “events like this are necessary to hear the lived experience.”

The Vanuatuan facilitator also said that—by listening to the needs and desires young people have expressed in their own communities—the government then began to take initiatives at the international level. Using this form of consultation, the facilitator explained, allowed the people and the government of Vanuatu to better understand the challenges they face and to devisce plans to address them at home and with international partners.

Delegates from the BIC were asked to speak at four further events, including hosting an event at the Faith Pavilion, a multi-NGO platform created for COP, with significant support from the Muslim Council of Elders, to explore and amplify the intersections between faith, justice, and environmental stewardship. The BIC’s event explored how faith—religious or otherwise—can inspire and motivate action when so many government policies on climate remain ideas rather than actions.

“While global leaders negotiate solutions to the climate crisis, grassroots efforts are fostering a culture of environmental stewardship,” said Cecilia Schirmeister, another BIC Representative who attended COP and who moderated the Faith Pavilion event. “Local communities are identifying challenges, consulting, and working together to take meaningful action, guided by science, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational collaboration. In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, there is hope in these efforts, and COP offers us all a chance to build on this progress.”

María Fernanda Espinosa, a former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Ecuadorian government minister, spoke at the Faith Pavilion event, and said that multilateral decision-making was “slow” and “complex,” and needed “wise and strong leadership” with those leading such processes to act as “bridgebuilders” instead of following partisan agendas.

“In the case of the climate negotiations,” Ms. Fernanda Espinosa added, “the fear of what is happening … the sense of loss, the sense of danger and risk” was a key source of pressure in the COP discussions. “Faith” can also help people to tackle the “hope deficit,” she added.

“Human responsibility, working for the common good, creating governance structures that help to govern our global commons; this is perhaps the most important challenge of the 21st century in terms of the multilateral space,” including at COP29, she said.