COP 29: Moving Beyond Aspirations

When it comes to the energy transition, there is really just one central fact:

We need to do better.

It’s good to pause and appreciate that we have made dramatic progress.

In 2010, just 1.7% of the world’s electricity was produced by solar and wind.

Last year, solar and wind produced 13.4% of the world’s electricity — an all-time high. Solar and wind added more new energy to the global mix than any other source.

We’ve learned how to capture renewable energy. What’s more: We’re doing it.

Here’s another figure from last year that’s really remarkable: Electricity produced using oil and coal also reached an all-time high.

The increase in the use of oil and coal was relatively small (2.5% and 1.6%, respectively) while the growth in solar and wind is dramatically higher. But, in 2023, greenhouse gas emissions worldwide reached an all-time high.

The trends are troubling because we need to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon. That’s the only way to protect our biodiversity, our cities, our farms, our families, our natural resources, our planet. We need to be reducing emissions fast. Instead, they are climbing higher.

As 40,000 people, including many leaders, gather this week for COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, COP 29 itself is a signal of the urgency of the task. The world has never gathered in this way, year after year, 29 times, to tackle a single problem.

We are bringing our talent and resources to bear because we know we need to, and we know we can do better.

What’s new in the 29^th year?

Four things:

1. We know smart climate solutions do not hinder economic vibrancy. That myth has hobbled us for decades. In fact, the opposite is true. To reach growth and progress, security and resiliency, we must address climate impacts.
2. We know how to do what we need to do. At the first COP in Berlin in 1995, we knew what the big goals needed to be. Today we have the technology, the tools, the experience to reduce emissions, deploy national scale solar, and transition to smarter farms and factories. None of these solutions are limited to certain nations. We can use them everywhere.
3. We know the price of moving too slowly. Every month, everywhere in the world, climate-related disasters are killing people, upending communities, withering farms or washing them away, shrinking economic opportunity, and causing suffering. If anyone wonders whether the worries about climate impacts might be overblown, just look to Valencia, Spain. Nature is showing us the cost of a changing climate. Here too, the economics are astonishing: $1 spent on climate resilience saves $13 in damage, destruction, rebuilding. It’s an investment we should be eager to make.
4. Fear isn’t working. We can’t scare people into taking more dramatic action. We need to help them understand. The best way to get people to understand is through stories. Storytelling is perhaps the most potent, and the most under-rated, tool we have.

We know that today we can electrify our whole world using renewable energy. We need to tell that story to leaders of nations and villages and companies in every part of the world.

We can make farming sustainable. We can match what we grow to a shifting climate, teach farmers to adapt, feed everyone. We need to tell that story, with imagination and urgency.

We can make our cities and our communication networks, our ports and our highways, and our coastal communities, safe from disaster.

But we need to explain how that works and show how it looks. We need more people to see how these measures will power growth and security and will cost much less than waiting for the next extreme weather disaster.

We need a geography of hope, instead of a geography of doom.

A friend of mine, David Yarnold, the former head of the National Audubon Society in the United States, recently published a book called the “geography of hope.” That phrase is exactly the kind of fresh perspective, and the kind of fresh rallying cry, we need to push through our current situation.

A geography of hope is powered by storytelling. This means we tell the stories of success, not as a way of papering over the work that still needs to be done, but just the opposite: As a way of inspiring ourselves to grab hold of that work. We need our most talented storytellers in every realm — film and print, the internet and in-person.

Every human culture on Earth has a strong tradition of storytelling. Storytelling is how you build culture.

It’s how you reach understanding.

It’s how you call for urgency.

It is how you inspire a common sense of mission.

I’m a mapmaker by profession. The company my wife Laura and I founded half a century ago, Esri, has become a worldwide powerhouse of digital mapmaking. And maps are powerful storytelling tools.

So, I come to this question of carbon reduction and climate resilience with a bias — but here’s one more truth: Everything having to do with climate — the impacts and the solutions — starts with a single question, where?

Where are climate impacts happening? Where are people and ecosystems endangered? And where do we need to deploy solutions?

Maps are central to the solutions, and to the storytelling we need to do. Maps show us the world as it is. They show us things we can’t see in tables or charts or spreadsheets.

Maps do something else. We have torrents of data about climate — more data than most of us can comprehend. Maps can organize all that data. That’s part of the magic of their storytelling. Modern maps can absorb and present waves of data in a way no other technique comes close to matching. Then those maps can be read and understood by anyone.

Mapmaking used to be the province of an elite. Now, like so much else in our world, mapmaking has been democratized. As we can deploy our climate solutions in every geography and economic setting, so anyone with a climate story to tell can use maps. It is one more of the powerful tools that make today much different than even a decade ago. Maps — stories — let people see reality clearly, and then collaborate to create solutions together.

As this COP gathers, we need a geography of hope. We need to motivate people with the world we can create.

We need a future based on a positive vision, one that leverages human creativity as well as our best science and understanding. Geography, the science of our world, together with a whole new generation of digital mapping and visualization, are providing such a framework. They are providing a platform for creating a positive future in organizations of all kinds.

As those at COP29 discuss and debate through the next two weeks, I hope they’ll be guided by five core principles:

• Rely on real information (maps can help)
• Act with fairness
• Act with urgency
• Set bold goals — incremental goals are too little
• Use money in ways that gets maximum impact

Because one more thing has become clear since the first COP in 1995: Climate impacts do not respond to wishful thinking. We have started to change the world. Finishing the job requires clear-eyed realism — alongside the hope.

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Learn how modern mapping technology can empower us with location-based solutions to climate-related challenges.