A COP on the Shores of a Great River
For David Duncan
Greetings! I’m writing from the first leg of my travel to Belém and COP30. Despite being in transition myself, this may be one of the most important essays I’ve written for AGWA. Indeed, AGWA itself is in transition.
I approach this COP personally — and as a member of AGWA — with both fear and hope.
The fear is not about a failure of resilience or of climate policy. Indeed, I have a deep faith that adaptation and resilience issues are rising rapidly, as I will describe in more detail below. The fear comes from threats that have been building since last April for AGWA’s ability to function legally and, by extension, financially. Working quietly with staff and with AGWA’s Board of Directors and our Strategic Advisory Committee over the past several months, we have developed a plan to address these issues. Our concerns are existential but we also believe they can be avoided with preparation. Indeed, if we can implement this approach, we believe that AGWA will actually be more effective and stronger going forward. Even as we protect ourselves, we see new opportunities. And in fact, reducing risk and grasping opportunities is the heart of how we describe resilience in practice.
With AGWA’s staff, I have drafted a blog that describes this plan. Together, we ask you to read this letter. We’re asking for you — AGWA’s members — for help in implementing this plan. Truly, we need your support. We have never reached out like this before. If this plan resonates with you, we hope you answer our call and share the word about our plans and needs more broadly.
In contrast, my hope comes from what seems like the significance of this specific COP: a southern COP, the Brazilian COP, the Amazon COP. The global political and economic context has been tilting quickly towards instability, but we also see an urgent need, desire, and even demand for resilience — resilience with a blue heart. A COP on the shores of a great river.
David Duncan, an old friend who passed away a few years ago, often asked me to write an essay before each COP for OoskaNews to say what I thought was at stake for the water and climate communities. If I were writing for him today, I would say that early indicators suggest important movement: a COP pregnant and full. Insights we as a network have developed and implemented together are quickening, moving up in scale and import. The winds are directed, not simply blustering and against us. These winds fill our sails.
Many individuals and institutions active in the climate space have realized this year that the two stalwarts of “climate action” — advocating for clean energy as a moral rather than an economic good, and building the pool of available climate finance — will show limited progress for the foreseeable future. These changes have less to do with any single government than global trends; all nations are looking more inward, looking for their own interests.
The start of autumn at my own home in Oregon, especially the shift to late fall and what has been called “stick season” with bare trees, darkened days, rain-filled clouds, and cool nights, tempts a darkness of the soul. In a few hours, though, I will be walking into the Global South’s spring: clear, humid, warm, fecund. We must all look towards the spring right now and avoid the temptation towards darkness and estivation.
Hope is needed for those of us in the windswept cold. Hope is also justified.
John Matthews
Atlanta airport, Georgia, USA
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