After the Climate Summit: The U.N.'s Way Forward

This post is part of Triple Pundit's ongoing coverage of the SXSW Eco conference. For the rest, please visit our SXSW Eco page here.

If you're anything like me, it was tough to step away from the computer during Climate Week NYC. Like so many others, I scrolled tirelessly through Twitter during the People's Climate March, which drew more than 400,000 supporters from all over the world in a hopeful foreshadowing of things to come. Then it was quickly on to live feeds of the United Nations Climate Summit, a historic gathering that promised to pave the way to a more sustainable future.

But last week as I strolled through the Austin Convention Center at the 2014 SXSW Eco conference, I overheard murmurings that the march and summit had disappeared from news feeds as quickly as they arrived -- that the media had all but forgotten the momentum supporters worked so hard to build.

Of course, just because a subject vanishes from the 24-hour news cycle doesn't mean it loses its footing at the forefront of the public agenda. For activists, supporters and, yes, even world leaders, the U.N. Climate Summit is still very much a hot topic. As a group of sustainability professionals, nonprofit leaders and reporters filed into a U.N. panel discussion at SXSW Eco, it was clear the summit still mattered a great deal to us. We all had one question on our minds: What happens next?

The summit did not disappoint in terms of its significance. More than 100 world leaders gathered and pledged commitments to help slow the pace of climate change. Twenty-eight governments, along with 35 top companies and nearly 100 other groups, signed the New York Declaration on Forests -- pledging to cut deforestation in half by 2020 and end it completely the following decade. Several European countries announced that they would target 40 percent greenhouse gas reductions over 1990 levels. China came in with a plan to cut carbon intensity by up to 45 percent by 2020 over 2005 levels. Closing the summit, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “I asked for bold announcements from governments, business, finance and civil society in five key areas. The summit delivered.”

Planners and delegates now look forward to the climate change conference in Lima in December and, ultimately, the 2015 gathering in Paris when it is hoped a global climate agreement will be reached. And while we knew all of this, the question on our minds was more philosophical. Rather than pondering what would happen next for U.N. climate delegates, perhaps more to the point we wondered: Is it for real this time?

The room was a diverse mix, with reporters who attended the first COP meeting in 1994 sitting side-by-side with those who had been too busy roller blading and writing letters to Santa Claus. But the quiet, cautionary skepticism was resounding. Is this latest climate summit just another Montreal? Another Copenhagen? Would interest briefly pique only to fizzle and die? Kalee Kreider, special advisor on climate science for the U.N. Foundation, touched on this sentiment almost immediately, saying:

"[The Climate March] was the first real moment I felt an end to the certain 'climate silence' that folks had experienced -- and sort of the frustration when the legislation in the U.S. collapsed and the Copenhagen Treaty talks didn't go so well. I really felt like folks had not only recuperated, but that there was something new and something different."

Andrew Freedman, senior climate reporter for Mashable who has been reporting on climate issues for nearly two decades, agreed: "As a jaded reporter who's been to Copenhagen and covered this stuff almost as long as [Kreider has], I came away from the New York summit with some sense of hope of where things are going."

One key distinction that separated this latest climate talk from those before it, Freedman pointed out, is that "it was a momentum summit; it wasn't a negotiating summit." With recent memories of marchers flooding the streets of New York as a backdrop, delegates and business leaders were free to discuss the subject openly -- and enter into voluntary commitments that hint at how far they're willing to go as talks move forward.

"What it was," Freedman said "was countries and companies signaling where they're thinking about going and how ambitious they're thinking in the near future." The sense of urgency presented by the march, he added, created a perfect storm that just may build momentum heading into Paris talks.

"The Climate March definitely gave Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a lot of inspiration," he said. "I think he really felt it in his gut having marched with people that day to really ask leaders to be ambitious and courageous at that summit and heading into Paris. Because there's a sense that this is pretty much the last chance we have before we lock in enough infrastructure to take us well over the 2 degrees Celsius target that countries agreed to in Copenhagen. "It's clear where countries are going, and I think we're getting to a system where countries are coming to ambitious action on their own."

If the commitments made at the summit are any indication of what's to come, the cautiously optimistic among us can look forward to some big things coming out of Paris next year. Nevertheless, when it comes to this subject, optimism can be difficult. As the discussion drew to a close, a veteran climate action supporter with kind eyes and a soft smile stepped up to the microphone. She went on to say that she'd been in the climate action space since 1988 and at many times had despaired deeply about the global climate future. In closing, she asked a short but weighty question: "Can we actually turn this around?" Kreider's response shocked the room in a beautiful and unexpected way.

"The reason that I don't despair is that I want to keep us below 2 degrees Celsius. I don't know that we will; we may inflect higher than that. But I'll say this: I'm at the point where I got to see the Berlin Wall come down. I actually thought it was going to be there forever, but the wall came down and a lot of things changed. I won't go into the geopolitics of that only to say this: It can appear intractable.

"When the wall came down, retrospectively people said, 'Well there were all these indicators that change was coming.' I will say this to you: I actually think that there are a lot of indicators that change is happening. You see it in the solar and the wind industry. You see it actually at some companies. You see it on the streets of New York.

"I can't tell you when the wall is going to come down. I can't tell you at what temperature the wall is going to come down. I can't tell you what we might lose between now and when the wall is going to come down. But the wall will come down, and when the wall comes down we are going to be there. And the only way the wall is going to come down is if each and every one of us and everyone that we know helps to make that happen."

After a collective blink of disbelief, the room erupted into applause. And even as panelists answered the remaining questions, the sunny cloud of optimism left behind by Kreider's statement never faded. As we filed out of the room that day, we were left with a sense of hope and excitement of what's to come. Only time will reveal the results of the 2015 Paris summit. In the meantime all we can do is chant, "Tear down that wall!"

Image credit: Rebecca Hedges Lyon, courtesy of SXSW Eco

Based in Philadelphia, Mary Mazzoni is a senior editor at TriplePundit. She is also a freelance journalist who frequently writes about sustainability, corporate social responsibility and clean tech. Her work has appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News, the Huffington Post, Sustainable Brands, Earth911 and the Daily Meal. You can follow her on Twitter @mary_mazzoni.