As a conference, COP29 has been reported by the international press to be a fractious one, with concerns over whether global solutions to climate change and energy can be found in Azerbaijan this month.

But for UCalgary delegates, important conversations are being held and lessons learned from COP29 are likely to inform policy discussions and research back here in Calgary.

Dr. Ian Gates, Director for Global Research Initiative for Sustainable Low-Carbon Unconventional Resources and a Professor at the Schulich School of Engineering, was one of those delegates who traveled to Baku for the conference.

“I’m just constantly surprised by the commonality of the challenge that people face, that there’s a real connection here to all of us, that we all are suffering similar issues globally,” Gates told LWC.

“We worry about our kids, we worry about our families, and that’s what motivates us to deal with climate change. It’s for the next generation, the next seven generations and beyond.”

His presence at COP29 this year was as a part of the Blue Zone at the conference—the formal conference and negotiation space for accredited United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) participants, heads of state, and admitted observers.

He said that his goal for this conference was to have as many conversations with participants as possible, and learn the concerns that other energy users have.

“This is a place where these things are discussed in a truly transdisciplinary way, where you’re talking about energy issues with folks that, for instance, I’m an engineer, but you’re talking with someone who is not an engineer, and in fact lives in a community and is struggling and needs energy security,” Gates said.

“Their concerns and thoughts are vastly different, but inform someone like me immensely on the way to focus my research, my thoughts and with respect to training the next generation of energy researchers, what the important things to focus on are.”

Dr. Gates said those conversations so far have been with members of the energy industry, governments and NGOs, but also representatives of communities that are struggling with energy security and the impacts of climate change.

“For instance, for an island, it’s sea level rise. So these are the kinds of people that are coming to these conferences, and they’re getting voice to say their concerns,” he said.

“But you talk to some communities where it’s not really about choice of energy, it’s any energy. It’s energy security, it’s energy poverty. For them, it’s really about what is available they can get there, and carbon intensity and survival isn’t really connected to that in their minds.”

He said that a key to a lot of those conversations were about making transitions to cleaner energy usage without harming prosperity—a complex issue considering the number of different sub-national and national interests of governments and industry worldwide.

“How do we do this so that we can keep jobs, and we can keep communities vital, and keep schools running, hospitals running, while transitioning in some way to cleaner sources? For us in Alberta, to me, we have to preserve what we have,” Gates said.

“We have to do it in a sequence that makes sense, that we can afford, and not make it such that it’s impossible for our industry, our energy industry, to move forward. We don’t want to find that we’re harming them to a point where they take no risk, they don’t try anything new, and in fact, they slowly go into decline. We don’t want this. So there’s this balancing act of finding policy and to find finance formats.”

Policy frameworks not enough say international leaders at COP29

One of the outcomes of COP29 has been criticism from international leaders about the ineffectiveness of the UNFCCC negotiations to find a solution to the increasingly detrimental impacts of climate change.

Commentary was provided on that on Nov. 15, in an open letter penned by the Club of Rome, and signed by former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres.

“Despite some of its flaws, and limited resources, the global policy framework is scientifically rigorous and economically sound and complete. But the framework alone is not enough to solve the problems,” read the letter.

“Global emissions continue to increase, carbon sinks are being degraded and we can no longer exclude the possibility of surpassing 2.9°C of warming by 2100… 28 COPs have delivered us with the policy framework to achieve this. However, its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”

Reported first by Reuters, that news agency said that as of Friday little progress had been made on the talks at COP29 and that individuals involved with negotiations have called COP29 a litmus test for the global climate architecture.

Dr. Gates said that there was a large desire to have conversations, but the difficulties lie in the actual steps needed to achieve positive change.

“There’s a huge amount of optimism with respect to we want to hit that target at some point in time. But the big miss, in my view, is a very clear agenda to do it with within a set of steps,” he said.

“The area I work in quite a bit is to reduce methane emissions. Those policies have led, for example in Alberta, to a huge amount of engagement of industry, academia and small tech vendors to answer the challenge of eliminating methane emissions. And yes, we are hitting and lowering those emissions. We’re going way down because of this framework that has been designed.”

He said that provincially that has come from the TIER program and funding incentives, but it was less clear what the mechanism that will work globally would be.

“Is it carbon tax? Is it pricing carbon, or is it incentives? Is it carrot, stick, or a combination of the two? And how do you do that and get nations to agree to that becomes a challenge within a set of actions within a time scale,” Gates said.

“Here at the University of Calgary, the few folks we send, it’s why we’re here. To discover these things, bring that home, and then start looking at how do we modify these energy systems to move things forward.”