By Tony Wright, chair of UNISON policy development and campaigns committee and NEC member for Yorkshire and Humberside
For those of you who don’t already know, COP stands for Conference of Parties, and it refers to the representative groups attending the annual worldwide negotiations on our changing climate and everything affected by it. Over recent years our union has been at the forefront of pushing forward climate and sustainability as key areas of discussion at all levels.
In my role as chair of the UNISON policy committee, I will be attending the negotiations as part of the ITUC delegation. ITUC is the International Trade Union Confederation, and as one of the designated non-governmental organisations, we will be representing the interests of over 200 million workers belonging to 340 unions from 169 countries.
The trade union delegation has played a key role in pushing for progress on areas that not only affect climate change, but also the rights and lives of our members and their families.
The finance COP
COP29 is being called ‘the finance COP’, because this is the year the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance is due to be agreed. The new climate finance goal, or NCQG, is the successor to the last funding pledge rich countries made to low-income ones, in 2009. That was $100 billion per year.
Countries have roundly failed to deliver the agreed amount year after year, which has led to extreme mistrust between nations and a lost decade of climate action.
In between each of the annual COP negotiations, lots of work goes on, planning for the critical high-level November discussions. As with previous years, ITUC has issued a clear list of demands that we will be pushing forward in Baku at every opportunity.
Climate finance for a just transition must include:
- Comprehensive funding to create decent, quality jobs in climate change mitigation sectors through financing workforce development, training, apprenticeships and redeployment
- Financial support for workers in high-emission sectors transitioning to low-carbon alternatives
- Adaptation and resilience measures, including safe and healthy workplaces
- Compensation for loss of livelihoods and damage to workers’ employment
- Funding for social protection and for social dialogue with trade unions throughout the transition process.
COP29 comes at an incredibly important time for communities being devastated by the climate crisis, and the trade unions which many of the people living in those communities belong to.
It is a matter of fairness that high-income countries such as the United Kingdom – which became rich from highly polluting coal, oil and gas-fuelled economic development – support poor countries financially both to decarbonise and to adapt to a vastly more volatile climate.
A need for progress
As well as my role on the NEC, I work as a full-time sustainability manager in our NHS. The involvement of the unions via staff side and partnership working is vital in steering our employers towards achieving the net zero carbon levels such as by 2040 in the NHS.
With this mind another important area we will be looking for progress on at COP29, is internationally recognised support in the workplace for branch roles such as environment officers or green reps.
Working with the TUC and our fellow trade unions under the new Labour government, we are hoping to see more statutory support for green reps such as protected facility time – as this is a vital role promoting green issues to members and holding employers to account.
Those are some of my hopes. In terms of fears, my main worry is that due to the different priorities of the parties represented, no significant progress will be made.
Unlike in one of our branch committee meetings where, if there is a difference of view a vote is taken and the majority is carried, under the way COP operates, every single group represented in the discussions has to agree on every single word of all of the many agreements covering numerous areas.
If you stop to think about just how wide the financial and political differences between the poorer and richer nations of the world are, it is easy to see why any progress at all is an achievement. But with time fast running out in terms of global warming, I just hope that common sense will prevail, and we see meaningful progress. It is good that UNISON will be in the room with an opportunity to push for the demands mentioned previously.
As part of my reporting back from last year’s COP28 negotiations, I did a daily blog, which I will be doing again this year from Azerbaijan. You can keep up to date with what is happening from a trade union perspective by following the daily blogs here.
