SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — It’s a desert, where little grows. It’s a climate conference, where water is scarce inside buildings and out, lines are long, tempers are short, meetings go late and above all progress comes in one-drop drips.
But hope can spring up in strange places.
Not in the naive new face, but in the hearts and minds of veteran activists and officials, who have gone through this frustrating sleep-depriving exercise, not once or twice but numerous times.
And it blooms in a odd metal “tree” sculpture in a center square here at the United Nations climate summit in Egypt. On green paper, people write down their hopes.
“Hope (sic), is what makes us ALIVE!” Mohamed Ageez wrote, a youth activist from Egypt.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore looks at more than 30 years of climate change efforts and sees hope in progress and change. Inger Andersen, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme and Katharine Hayhoe Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy see hope in everyone who works hard.
And Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate secretary who helped forge the 2015 Paris agreement and then started a non-profit called Climate Optimism, sees hope not as a noun but an action verb.
“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up,” Figueres told The Associated Press, quoting poet David Orr. “I think of hope and optimism as being very active and in fact being precisely the reason why we roll up our sleeves.”
Asked how he doesn’t despair after seeing heat-trapping emissions rising year after, Gore told The Associated Press: “Despair is a big word. They used to say that denial isn’t only a river in Egypt. Here we are in Egypt and despair ain’t just a tire in the trunk. This is a factor. But we also have the basis for hope.”
He pointed to several political wins this year.
“In August, the U.S. passed the biggest climate legislation in history,” Gore said.
In August, the Australian people made an historic change and agreed to be part of the global leadership for renewable energy. And then in October, just days ago, the people of Brazil made a decision to stop destroying the Amazon and start fighting the climate crisis.”
“When people feel vulnerable to climate despair, I urge them to look at the real progress that is being made.”
Whenever United Nations environment chief Andersen feels down in these meetings she takes note of what’s happening all around her in the pavilions and offices: “In these halls, you will see people huddling over solutions over networking, saying ‘Here’s what we did. Maybe you can do that’.”
Climate scientist Hayhoe finds hope in the same place.
“People often say that it failed and there is no hope. Hayhoe stated, “I say look at all the faces here. Every single one of them just wants to change the world.” “There are tens of thousands of faces here, and every single one of them just about wants to change the world.”
That tree of hope?
Gone.
It’s been moved away from negotiations to the “green zone,” far away from negotiators.
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