About 70,000 people arrived in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s largest oil producers, for this year’s United Nations climate summit, known as COP28.
Industry leaders, heads of state and diplomats gathered in Dubai at the annual summit to discuss ways to reduce emissions from fossil fuels and steer the world toward a more sustainable direction. David Gelles, who writes the Climate Forward newsletter for The New York Times, was among the attendees. He spent eight days reporting from the summit, which concludes Tuesday.
It was the third U.N. climate summit that Mr. Gelles attended as a reporter; he previously covered financial news for The Times and joined the Climate team in 2022. In an interview, he discussed how his background in business reporting shaped his approach to covering COP28 and what he learned from industry leaders. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Is there anything in particular from your past U.N. summit experiences that you kept front of mind while reporting at COP28?
I’ve covered the climate beat for a couple of years now, so one of the great things that happened this year was that I ran into people everywhere I went. I couldn’t walk from one building to the next around the convention center, which is the size of Central Park, without bumping into one, two or even three people. Sometimes they were C.E.O.s of big nonprofit organizations, like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Sometimes they were negotiators from different delegations, like Barbados. And sometimes they were executives who I’ve interviewed onstage before. COP is this critical mass of people working in the climate space who are all in one place at the same time. That’s a really exceptional experience.
Does your background in financial reporting help with the climate beat, especially when you run into industry leaders?
Big time. A big part of my climate coverage, for more than a year, has been the business angle. That’s not just how big companies are trying to become more sustainable themselves, or make their supply chains greener. It’s also how banks and big international lenders like the World Bank are trying to adapt to take on the climate crisis in more aggressive ways. Reporting on business for 15 years has been an enormous help as I’ve covered the money angle of the climate story.
Were the financial angles your main focus during the conference?
I wore a bunch of different hats. For the first couple of days, I anchored The Times’s live blog. I wrote a front-page article after the first full day of the conference. I then shifted into a space where I was taking lots of meetings, both those I had arranged ahead of time and spontaneous ones with C.E.O.s and negotiators on the sidelines. In the evenings, I moderated live New York Times events that took place at COP.
On Monday, Dec. 4, I did a fireside chat with former Vice President Al Gore and then interviewed several other nonprofit development experts and negotiators. The president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, who I knew when he was C.E.O. of Mastercard, dropped by before dinner. I interviewed him and I wrote an article about what was happening with the World Bank.
With so much going on, did you have a reporting routine?
There are not remotely enough hours in the day. Typically, I would have between two and five meetings scheduled over the course of a day and then try to leave time for spontaneous meetings. Those meetings were usually in different places around the expo area. Sometimes I would interview someone that I bumped into; sometimes I would see someone sitting at a coffee shop, having lunch, and I would sit down with them and interview them right there.
You had to be very opportunistic and not be afraid to pull out your tape recorder at any time. They were long, long days.
What were your main takeaways after talking to industry leaders?
It’s a moment of both hope and peril when you think about climate change right now. On the one hand, there are real gains in renewable energy. There is real momentum to try to reform the global financial system to make it more responsive to climate change. At the same time, we are just concluding the hottest year in recorded history. There are more climate disasters just about every week around the world; fossil fuel emissions and demand for fossil fuels, which is the main driver for global warming, continue to rise. We’re at this very precarious moment where there’s a lot of momentum. But things are also seriously dangerous. That’s why everyone is working as hard and as fast as they can to try to get us out of this mess. But it’s not going to be easy.
