Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez is on a mission at COP30 to save the trees — specifically the untold numbers that are sacrificed for the production of UN reports that no one reads.
Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy, usually spends COP meetings focused on finance and other common priorities. But this year, he told me, he is going into every meeting fixated on slashing paperwork. “People talk about drowning because of sea level rise, but no one is talking about bureaucrats drowning in stupid homework,” he said. Between COP and the multiple other environment-related UN conventions that Panama is a party to, he said, his office is responsible for producing nearly 50 reports every year, some stretching to hundreds of pages. And as a remarkably self-aware UN report in August made clear, nearly all of these reports are ignored even by the officials they ostensibly exist to inform.
All this paperwork is more than just an annoyance, he said: For small countries especially, the workload is an unsustainable drain on time and money, and the fragmentation of information across so many channels makes it extremely complicated to make progress on any of the world’s climate goals. The only people who benefit from this system, he said, are the Western consulting firms cashing checks to help. Panama’s solution is to consolidate all of its environment-related plans and status updates into one Nature Pledge, to be published this week, which Gómez said he hopes can be a model for other overwhelmed countries to follow. So if you see Gómez in the hallway in Belém — look for his signature broad-brimmed hat — just don’t ask him to put anything in writing.
I’m back home now after a fun week in Brazil (I highly recommend beers at De Bubuia), but still following COP until it wraps up later this week. On the second day of the conference, Brazilian officials promised it would run no more than “five, maybe 10 minutes” over schedule. If the past is any indication, that’s likely over-optimistic. Most of the key issues up for debate remain unresolved, but as more high-level ministers land in Belém this week, things can start to move quickly.