Climate activists marching on the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC during “Climate Week ” in September 2024 ( photo by Sarah Yenesel/EPA, published at featured link ).

 

By Marcy Rockman, Raising Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

This week the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ( COP29 ) begins in Azerbaijan. The COP29 Parties likewise are now one year into the second “stocktake” of their development under the Paris Agreement, and Micro-Climate has reached its 10th month, but I’m going to do a little assessment of purpose below.

In late September, former US Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry gave fossil fuel companies “a letter below Z” for their lack of progress in moving away from fossil fuels ( featured link below ). The time February 2023-January 2024 was the first to have an average temperatures of more than 1. 5℃. The goal of the US election last week is very possible to reduce the US from the Paris Agreement once, slowing US and international development toward its goals.

Recent reports are raising concerns about the apparent declining capacity of oceans and forests to absorb carbon ( pre-print, Guardian-global, Guardian-Finland ) and that reducing global temperatures by technical means if they exceed 1. 5℃ will be more challenging than expected. In turn, the World Wildlife Fund ( WWF ) reports that world wildlife populations have declined 73 % over the past half century.

In the face of all this, where does antiquities meet? WWF I think said it well, that

“( t )o maintain a living planet where people and nature thrive, we need action that meets the scale of the challenge…nothing less than a transformation of our food, energy and finance systems. ”

This is the area in which antiquities and history does work: building a vision that history is not about stasis but change, that culture and our senses of ourselves may be part of such transformations. The new UN Pact for the Future says this should be done; it is up to us to do it.

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