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As an instructor and one of the faculty leads for BC’s COP30 delegation, the mock climate negotiations hosted at the Schiller Institute on October 3rd were wonderful to participate in and experience. Catherine Goldberg, ’16, a former US climate negotiator, led this year’s delegation of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students through the basic negotiation processes that drive the development of agreements produced by COP meetings.

The exercise focused on a small portion of deceptively simple language related to just and equitable energy transitions in response to climate change. Goldberg assigned participants roles as representatives for different countries, directing us to develop starting positions, negotiating red lines, and a set of potential "landing zones" for where we might consider ending our negotiations. This allowed faculty and students alike to practice exploring the complex set of variables and conditions that representatives of each country attending COP must balance as they represent the interests of their country’s citizens in pursuit of positive climate action. 

However, the most impactful portion of the experience came from the negotiating process itself. Participants quickly realized how nuanced these negotiations must be, with even the smallest edits to language – changing a single punctuation mark, slight shifts in pronouns, altering verbs and qualifiers – having profound impacts on the meaning of an agreement. We all quickly learned how these changes can open up drastically different alternative paths forward, reshaping alliances by opening certain doors and closing others. While this only offered one small glimpse inside the political dynamism of climate negotiations, students and faculty alike were far better prepared to understand the processes and stakes of the negotiations we will observe while in Belem as a result. We are so grateful to Catherine Goldberg for sharing her time and expertise with us!