UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Laetitia Stuchtey, Art by Defne Celiktemur

It is November 2022. The desert burns orange, the ocean blue, and the Sharm el-Sheikh airport is overrun with suits. COP27, the sustainability conference of the year, is ready for take off in Egypt’s tourism capital. And with the swarm of privateers with briefcases under their arms, and government officials with personal protection at theirs, the usual criticism reaches its boiling point. The topics are the same as always; the lack of action, the amount of emissions by flying in government officials and CEOs at its forefront. Yet, the criticism does little to prevent them from flying in. Or from avoiding the uncomfortable walk from the Blue Zone (the UN led one for people with restricted access passes, the VIPs) to the Green Zone (unrestricted, the zone of the pleb) in the Egyptian sun. Why cross the campus and a highway on foot, when a taxi-cab’s combustion engine comes with the cool blast of an AC? 

The Plague of Sewage  

The waters of Egypt will run dark, and the people will not be able to drink the water.  

COP27 seemed to provide a whole new range of headlines to the COP-critique variations. In the first week of the COP, a sewage pipe broke in the Blue Zone, creating a mess of disastrous smells for the Very Important Persons and hilarious headlines for the journalists. And as it turned out, this mishap provided a flavourful palette of symbolisms. Most obviously, it was (bull)shit that was absolutely unignorable. Instead of bathing in the appreciative back pats and proud if-it-were-not-for-you’s after a panel and before resting up in a Lufthansa Senator lounge, the VIPs were confronted with a reality check (even if unintentional) that was hard to overlook. 

Secondly, the gross black water helped to discuss another thorn in COP27’s side.  

The Plague of Greed  

Stretch out your hand over the water and you will see that it runs red.  

Let me introduce the union buster, the world’s number one polluter, the water syphoner – the one and only Coca-Cola. And, in 2022, also the main sponsor of the most important sustainability and climate conference. A title that seems rather becoming for a company that is tied to the fossil fuel industry so tightly, without working on improving their climate impact, and even further, without acknowledging the issue. But, as with other companies that found themselves at the climate summit, this was a business decision. As were, I assume, the COP pavillons with merch desks dedicated to oil companies and airlines. 

The Plague of Flies  

They will send swarms of them for you and your officials.  

And besides their logos on the station tables, the airlines found impressive representation in the skies.  Every twenty minutes, another jet engine would rumble over the heads of the COP attendants, making the large, moss-overgrown COP27 sign tremble, interrupting the well-meaning panelists from sharing their evergreen messages. The flights were frequent enough that every journalist managed to snap their own version of the new unofficial COP27 emblem; A glorious private jet hovering over the COP event space, paved with fake grass and lined with fountains. All hail the climate conference! 

The Plague of Bugs  

The bugs will hide in your houses and rooms.  

With entry refusals and increased security checks, activists had a hard time even entering the city. Further, they also faced the brunt of the government’s efforts to keep the climate conference not quite so sustainable, to keep the attendees’ heads on a swivel and their lips closed just tightly enough. 

So, beyond the live cameras in all taxis and the suits with matching earpieces positioned at regular distances across the city, activists found themselves sharing their hotel rooms with planted bugs.  

The Plague on Activists  

Let our people go.  

And the government implied and exemplified the consequences of any misstep, any wrong word. But activists are rarely deterred by threats, it seemed only to add to the fire. On the first Saturday of COP27, hundreds of activists marched through the Blue Zone, “No climate justice without social justice,” they called. 

 They walked in support of, and supported by, Alaa Abd el-Fattah – by his hunger strike from his prison cell and with his words  “You have not yet been defeated” on their signs. Alaa Abd el-Fattah, Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist, was imprisoned for violating protest laws and spreading “false news”.  

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To Part the Seas  

A rather dismal backdrop, and one that might not suggest much hope to the untrained eye. But, after I listened to a climate activist who watched the COP27 attendees huff and puff with a smile, I learned that COP27 was for the first time a step out of climate change denial, a step that promises change is to come. 

I assume most of us are familiar with the steps of climate grief: 

1. Denial: Where we have been stuck and relentlessly so, for many past years. 

2. Disillusion and Anger: The anger and frustration that came with the disaster that was COP27, which finally brought upon a change. 

3. Bargaining: Taken most literally at COP28, where oil was sold “like a trade fair”. 

4. Depression: Brought in the “travesty of justice” at COP29, so much so that the president of COP called for participants to “not lose faith” in the COPs.   

5. Acceptance and Action: This November, COP30 will take place not, for once, in an oil country, but in a capital of biodiversity. After a series of dystopic COPs in the past, this Brazilian climate conference might bring with it the realisation and the action that we want to see in order to implement change. 

So, while grieving always hurts, the most painful part of the process is behind us. If I am right, not just the activists, but the suits are ready to take action this year. And I do hope that I am right.