UN climate talks: how new negotiators benefit from media training

The UNFCCC has a language of its own. And it doesn’t take long for those of us immersed in the process to start speaking it fluently. But we mustn’t forget that for the rest of the world, many of the commonly used terms and acronyms carry absolutely no meaning.

In the language of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Parties (countries) don’t cut emissions, they ‘mitigate’. They don’t set targets for emissions reductions, they submit ‘nationally determined contributions’. With UNFCCC decisions requiring consensus, these terms have been carefully negotiated precisely for their ambiguity. So using them to communicate clear messages is hardly helpful – which is why media training for new negotiators is really important.

Through the media, the public is informed and governments are held accountable. If governments can get away with a weak outcome from climate change negotiations that doesn’t commit them to any action, they very well might try.

But when there is pressure from the outside – such as when the Least Developed Countries Group (LDCs) helped build a narrative in the lead up to COP27 that it would be a failure to leave Sharm El-Sheikh without establishing a fund for addressing loss and damage caused by climate change – real breakthroughs can be achieved.

As part of our programme to strengthen the abilities of new climate negotiators from Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to engage effectively in the UNFCCC process, IIED provided a media training ahead of SB58 for the programme’s 12 new negotiators (exhibit A of how easy it is to slip into the jargon… SB58 refers to the 58^th meetings of the ‘subsidiary bodies to the UNFCCC, or the Bonn Climate Change Conference, held in June 2023). Our aim was to improve the confidence of these new negotiators in interviews and in engaging with the media more generally.

What the media training involved

For our new negotiators, the interactive media training was an opportunity to develop and hone their media skills. It was held over two half-days and conducted in parallel in both French and English. It set out why and when it might be useful to share messages through the media, how social media can be used effectively (something I can preach but don’t often practice), and our top tips for communicating UNFCCC issues to a much broader audience.

To practice ‘not speaking UNFCCC’, we gave participants a list of some of the LDC Group’s specific expectations for the negotiations in Bonn. We then tasked them with translating each from ‘UNFCCC’ into English (or French, in the case of the training happening in parallel).

We thought this might be difficult; from our experience with more senior negotiators (some of whom have spent decades in the process) we know that it can be hard to switch off the technical talk to explain your point in a way the ‘outside’ can easily understand: negotiators love to talk about NAPs, work programmes, 2.1c and the WIM.

But the new negotiators excelled at developing clear and powerful messaging. Fairly fresh to the UNFCCC process and acutely aware of the very real consequences these negotiations have for their communities and their futures (and of course having just taken our training, which we like to believe had something to do with it), they were each able to spell out in simple terms what it was all about.

We then spent some time carrying out and videoing mock interviews where they could practice communicating their key priorities and answering (or expertly avoiding) slightly trickier questions, before watching each back for participants to learn from one another and provide very friendly (gushing!) feedback as well as some kind and constructive criticism.