The Game is Rigged at COP...

Katie Williams, UKYCC COP Working Group

Imagine you are a scientist specialising in cancer research. You work in a team who have conducted extensive research into causes and treatments of various cancers and you are attending an international conference on global health policy. You hope to use this conference to help global leaders reduce rates of cancer in their home countries. During the conference, you discover that some of the attendees work for tobacco companies, and are using the conference to persuade decision makers that cigarettes are actually not so bad for your health, so perhaps we don’t need to think about helping people to stop smoking. Horrified? We would be too.

You are probably not a cancer scientist, and this conference is not real, but something similar is happening at international climate change conferences. The annual COP summits are where countries come together to agree what should be done in response to climate change, including setting targets for emissions reduction and agreeing financial support for low-income countries. You may have seen the news last year that over 1,700 delegates who attended the COP29 negotiations had ties to the fossil fuel industry. COP28 had even more attendees with links to fossil fuel companies - 2,456, representing nearly 3% of attendees - and both COP28 and COP29 were overseen by Presidents that had worked extensively for oil companies. This presents a significant problem when asking countries to take drastic action to tackle climate change. We know that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of climate change, but how can we expect our leaders to limit fossil fuel use when the very people who make money from selling fossil fuels are players at the table?

UKYCC members protesting against fossil fuel interests at COP

Greenwashing is a term used to describe how companies that may not be very green present misleading slogans and information to persuade people that they are doing all the right things. Fossil fuel companies are very good at this; in 2018-19, five major fossil fuel companies spent $195 million on advertising campaigns that suggested they were taking action to tackle climate change. However, a 2023 report by Greenpeace, found that less than 10% of investments by them and seven other fossil fuel companies was on renewable energy, with 92.7% of spending going on new fossil fuel projects. More recently, BP has even slashed funding for green energy initiatives and increased spending plans for fossil fuel projects.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, fossil fuel companies have been spending vast sums of money influencing decision makers to delay climate action. It was reported in 2019 that the major fossil fuel companies Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total spend a total of $201 million per year on efforts to control, delay or block climate policy. In 2018, Shell’s Chief Climate Change Adviser even openly declared that the company had had a significant impact on the Paris Climate Agreement, in particular the contentious Article 6, which outlines how companies will be able to use carbon markets to buy credits for emissions reductions made by others elsewhere, instead of directly reducing their own emissions. 

The conflict of interest presented by the attendance of fossil fuel companies at climate talks has been highlighted by the hosting of the last two COPs in the oil-producing countries of Azerbaijan and the UAE. The influence of the fossil fuel industry will continue to be a key issue at COP30 in November; just nine months ahead of hosting the summit, Brazil joined the OPEC+ alliance of oil-producing nations, and is the seventh-largest oil producer in the world. 

But fossil fuels are not the only polluting industry at play in Brazil; commercial agriculture, or agribusiness, is responsible for much of the deforestation that occurs in the Amazon, further contributing to climate change. Not only this, but the industry has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of activists in Central and South America. Brazil is the second deadliest country in the world for environmental activists, with 25 people killed in 2023 for defending their lands against the interests of polluting industries. More than half of those killed were indigenous people fighting to protect their ancestral lands. Although less-well represented at COP than the fossil fuel industry, agribusiness companies sent over 200 delegates to COP29, many of them as part of country delegations.

Conflicts of interest have been an issue at COP for a long time. In 2016, the UNFCCC began a process to enhance the transparency of the talks, however little progress has been made. Although countries including Ecuador were supportive of the move, efforts to make necessary changes were reportedly blocked by countries including Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Norway. Since then, the issue has been relatively forgotten, and it has only been in the last few years that the public have been made aware of just how many delegates are associated with fossil fuel companies.

Over the next two weeks, the UN intersessional negotiations that happen in between each COP (SB62) are taking place in Bonn. These negotiations get a lot less attention, but will lay much of the groundwork for COP30 later in the year. UKYCC will be working with other campaigners in Bonn to ask countries to:

• Acknowledge the problem that fossil fuel and other vested interests play at COP.

• Support the negotiation of a clear conflict of interest policy and accountability framework for future COPs.

• Develop their own domestic conflict of interest policies to ensure their delegates are not acting with vested interests.

Governments have been negotiating on climate change for a long time - longer than anyone in UKYCC has been alive. And yet, every year emissions have continued to rise. This failure is in part due to the influence of corporations who will do anything to maintain their profits, at the expense of the wellbeing of today’s youth and future generations. If climate negotiations are a game of give and take, then the game is rigged. It’s time to call time on dirty tactics and kick big polluters out of COP for good.

Follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn to keep up with our work at the SB62 talks, or email the team at cop@ukycc.org if you want to work with us on this issue.