The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference begins today in Türkiye, and 18 scientists and policy experts from the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth are attending.
Matti Goldberg is director of international policy for Woodwell, and he's leading the Woodwell delegation at COP31, the 31st Conference of the Parties.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to Goldberg recently to learn more.
Gilda Geist You're the lead for Woodwell at the COP31. What does that role entail?
Matti Goldberg My work is about really helping connect Woodwell science with the global climate policy conversation that happens at each COP every year, where governments draft international law and stakeholders come to the meetings to collaborate and to create momentum, et cetera. So, my work in this whole constellation is, first of all, it's about looking at the science that Woodwell is doing, what's going to happen at the COP, what are the big questions that the COP is asking, and connecting the two. The other thing is then to help coordinate the logistical aspects. This year, we have a total of 18 colleagues going to the COP. We want to make sure that they have meaningful things to do and meaningful connections there. So, we look at what kind of events are available at the COP, and then we kind of try to guide our scientists towards those opportunities. And then when we get to the COP itself, my main work there is a lot about kind of monitoring what's going on around the conference and what that means for Woodwell. And then kind of on the spot connecting our colleagues and our leadership, kind of plugging them into some of the key conversations. The COP is a very, very intense environment. It's very hard to figure out what's happening unless you have a sense for how that whole thing operates. And I used to work for the UN Climate Change Secretariat for a long, long time, so I'm kind of used to that environment.
GG In terms of the whole delegation, what do you hope the team is able to achieve at the conference?
MG The main objective really is this very difficult debate: how can we align the global climate effort and national actions with the Paris Agreement's temperature goals? And right now, it looks like we're about to miss the 1.5 degrees limit anyway. So, the second part of that question is: what do we do in what's called an overshoot scenario of 1.5? How do we minimize that overshoot and how do we come back? And so, Woodwell Science is important for this conversation because we have a lot of expertise on emissions from permafrost, emissions from wildfires, emissions from other natural sources that also make a difference in terms of how big this overshoot will be. So, we are bringing that science to the COP so that policymakers can better understand what sort of overshoot they're dealing with, and then hopefully they can take the kinds of decisions that are needed to bring the temperature down again over a much longer timeframe. So that's kind of the first area. The second one relates to forests. So, forests have been a very central part of the climate conversation for a long time, and also at this COP there are important developments. The presidency of the previous COP will publish a Forest Roadmap that's supposed to kind of give a global pathway towards ending deforestation by 2035. And Woodwell scientists have been very active in providing technical inputs to that exercise. So, that's kind of the second aspect. And the third one I wanted to highlight are wildfires. Over the last year, wildfires have really become a much bigger issue, in their magnitude, unfortunately, but also in the international policy conversations. And Woodwell has a large amount of expertise on wildfires. We are going to, at the COP, connect with this wildfire conversation and bring Woodwell's expertise as a best practice into the next steps under that call to action.
GG Having been to about 17 COPs in the past, what's something maybe new or different you're expecting at this one?
MG We are in a bit of a transition stage. The Paris Agreement in 2015 defined the broad contours of climate collaboration, so that framework is going to remain in place for a long time, mainly because it's the best that can be achieved with the political realities. The UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and the UN climate conferences, they've been struggling to move into what they like to call implementation to put into action the Paris Agreement, which means there is less need for a major international deal to emerge, and there's more need in really putting into actions the goals and the processes that have been already defined. And this COP is a big part of that transition. Implementation is getting much more highlighted.
