By Necia Quast

I was one of two in-person official observers for the League of Women Voters in Baku, Azerbaijan, last November. The other observer covered the first week of the Conference of the Parties, or COP, and I covered the second. My brief was to report back on whatever I found interesting. I decided there was no point in watching the negotiations; journalists, spokespersons and observers gave regular readouts on the lack of progress. Beyond the negotiations, the days had themes. I attended panels on agriculture, on cities, sea ice and mountain glaciers, and on youth. I talked to a state representative from Yakima on a panel at the U.S. pavilion about disaster preparedness. I went to the pavilions of countries where I had lived and worked, such as Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Bangladesh. I tracked down the observer from the Quaker UN Office and occasionally caught up and exchanged notes with a young doctor from Kenya who was seated next to me on my flight there. He worked in a refugee camp and was an observer for Physicians Against Nuclear Weapons.

I learned that petrostates, patriarchy and corporate interests sought to roll back previous commitments, especially to phase out fossil fuel use and for obstructing stronger action. The last three COPs were hosted by petrostates — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and now Azerbaijan, which used its COP presidency to block reform of carbon trading rules easily gamed by emitters. Saudi Arabia used assistance and preferential oil trading to pressure countries to fall into line. The Executive Secretary of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change acknowledged there were 1,800 fuel industry lobbyists present. In some cases, the heads of national petroleum companies were part of country delegations.

Many groups protested as this same cabal, host Azerbaijan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Vatican proposed to remove existing language about human rights and gender equality from climate agreements. Women makeup over half the world’s subsistence farmers and, as such, are among the most severely impacted by climate change. While agriculture is a key sector both in contributing to and potentially mitigating climate change. The fights over keeping the commitment to human rights and supporting women farmers are now annual battles.

The climate impact on agriculture and food security is high. Droughts, fires, extreme heat and floods are increasingly frequent and severe, but less than 4% of climate funding goes to agriculture; most of that is in developed countries, with only a fraction going to smallholders, the most threatened, most of them women. We are not hitting the targets to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and at 2 C, 70% of food crops will not be viable where they grow now. Still, agricultural innovation is moving fast. Genetic research is producing higher-yield drought-resistant varieties. Asia is switching to dry-seeding rice that produces two crops, uses less water and lowers emissions. They are developing nitrogen-fixing versions of maize, wheat and rice that are self-fertilizing. A think-tank released a study showing that U.S. agriculture could become greenhouse gas negative by reduced emissions and increased carbon capture. There was optimism that agriculture could shift from being a part of the problem to being a part of the solution.

With each of the last several years being the hottest on record, with emissions increasing rather than falling, and the news that last year for the first time, the carbon sinks — the ocean, forests, ecosystems that usually sequester some carbon, failed, but instead emitted carbon equal to the amounts absorbed. Out of 30-some key ecosystems, half a dozen are unstable and approaching tipping points where collapse would become irreversible — polar ice, permafrost, glaciers and the Atlantic circulation system, among them. Young people at the conference were especially frustrated at the lack of urgency.

Still, there is positive news. With renewable energy now cheaper than fossil fuels for producing electricity, the market is doing more to phase out fossil fuels than official actions. The most important action is ultimately local, and because that is where people experience the impact, local governments are stepping up. Cities are responsible for 70% of global emissions but produce 80% of world gross domestic product, or GDP. Nearly 11,000 cities have their own climate plans and commitments, and more than 800 have committed to becoming net zero. 75% of cities are reducing emissions faster than national commitments. Whatever the national government does in the United States, states representing over half the U.S. population remain committed to climate action through the “We’re Still In” movement. Subnational actors — states, cities, businesses and communities — often have more ambitious targets than nations. The more steps we take as individuals, the more individual action becomes collective action.