Inside the ‘anti-COP’: A summit for climate activists who are fed up

It took Samoan activist Tunaimati’a Jacob Netzler three flights and a bus ride over the course of 24 hours to reach the big climate conference. The plan was to join nearly 200 other campaigners from around 40 countries to discuss the fate of the planet.

But Netzler wasn’t traveling to Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29. Instead, he headed to Oaxaca, Mexico, for the Global Meeting for Climate and Life that organizers dubbed an “anti-COP.” The gathering would strike a decidedly different tone than its more formal United Nations counterpart. Luxury hotels and private jets gave way to dormitories and composting toilets that reflected the activists’ aim to create a more egalitarian space.

“It really brought together people that wouldn’t normally be engaged in the formal COP process,” said Netzler, the Pacífic campaign associate for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “It brought those in the frontline communities.”

Last week’s event was a byproduct of the sentiment that, after almost 30 years, COPs are doing too little to address runaway greenhouse gas emissions. Even the former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which governs the annual meeting, has called the whirlwind events—which attracts everyone from heads of states to oil industry lobbyists—“distracting.”

Activists in Oaxaca also rallied around a shared feeling of exclusion from the international confab, and concerns that the solutions that come out of it are harming communities. Anti-COP aimed to provide “a space to articulate our struggles and propose concrete alternatives [to the status quo].” The five-day gathering ended with a final statement that outlined the movement’s next steps —including plans for increased coordination among participants and a proposal to send caravans of activists to next year’s COP in Brazil.

One primary goal of the event was to foster understanding between climate and land-defense movements that have historically worked in relatively separate spheres.

“There is a lot of hesitation from the Indigenous groups to collaborate with environmentalists because they’re viewed as white movements, or movements that are coming from the Global North,” explained Dianx Cantarey, the global coordinator for Debt for Climate, one of the grassroots organizations that helped host the anti-COP.

Beyond that, the gathering tackled four major themes: The impacts of clean energy megaprojects on the communities around them, the global water crisis, the “commodification of life,” and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. It also explicitly repudiated what activists see as governmental inaction in the face of the climate crisis. Participants describe the gathering as both a response and an antidote to COP gatherings, which they say often prioritize money, power, and fossil fuel interests over human life—a point underscored by the fact that Elnur Soltanov, the head of this year’s event, was filmed leveraging the summit to make oil deals.

“When you sit in your tenth opening statement [at COP], and it’s all the same, it’s frustrating to think that no other world is possible,”said Xiye Bastida, the executive director of the Re-Earth Initiative, a youth-led nonprofit focused on making the climate movement more accessible and inclusive. She went to Oaxaca because, ”for us, it’s not about the parts per million in the atmosphere, it’s about how our societies have transformed.”

Bastida, Netzler, and others at the anti-COP have felt marginalized by COP. She described cockroach-infested youth hotels at one year’s conference, and another participant recalled having once been turned away from the Indigenous pavilion. It hasn’t always been that way. At their outset in the 1980s and ’90s, climate negotiations were among the most welcoming and inclusive intergovernmental processes.

“Initially, the climate regime was extremely open, permeable, and transparent,” said Dana Fisher, director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community & Equity, who did not attend the anti-COP. But, she said, that began to change around 2009, when Danish police clashed with, and arrested, hundreds of climate protesters at COP15 in Copenhagen. Since then, civil society has been increasingly sidelined, a phenomenon that has been on particularly stark display at the last three COPS, which have been held in authoritarian states: Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and now Azerbaijan.

“There was a narrowing of opportunity for NGO observers and civil society members to participate,” said Fisher. “By the time we got to Egypt . . . they couldn’t go into the actual hall.”

As they’ve been squeezed out, advocates have lost trust in COPs, creating what Fisher calls an “interaction effect” that led to the depth of mistrust that gave rise to initiatives like anti-COP. Although this was the group’s second gathering, this year’s was much larger and the first to produce a roadmap for future action.

Anti-COP participants called for everything from mapping the financial interests behind clean energy megaprojects that impact Indigenous communities to building a database of best, successful land-defense practices and denouncing the election of Donald Trump. There were also more blunt pronouncements, including a declaration that “All COPs Are Bastards!”

Still, the anti-COP was held a week before the formal COP for a reason: Some of those who gathered in Oaxaca planned to be in Baku.

“For me, the space of COP is to read negotiation texts and make sure it includes and defends as many people as possible,” said Bastida, acknowledging that it’s sure to be a draining experience. But, she added: “If I didn’t go to anti-COP, I couldn’t go to a COP knowing that I’m doing my part to include voices that have been missing.”

This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.