COP29 Climate Negotiation Simulation Event, Belfast
On 19 November 2024, to coincide with the United Nations COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, British Council Northern Ireland hosted a COP29 climate negotiation simulation event in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We partnered with British Council Northern Ireland to support 6 students from St. Louis Dundalk and Dundalk Grammar (Ireland) and Newbridge Integrated College (Northern Ireland) to attend the event for the first time. The students joined over 100 other peers from schools in Northern Ireland for this special event which gave young people the opportunity to experience negotiating a climate deal. Playing the part of world leaders, Non-Governmental Bodies (NGOs) or Media, students were tasked with taking part in a real-life climate simulation, aiming to produce a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Students were given a brief in advance of the event which they worked on in groups throughout the day.
Read up more about the event here and click here to view photos from the day.
This event comes under the Climate Strand of our work in Youth Connect, British Council's global youth leadership programme which supports young people to develop the skills, inspiration and connections to tackle major challenges, such as climate change, employability and inequality. See the link below to find out more about our work in this area.
About British Council COP Climate Negotiation Simulation Events
During COP29, the world’s attention will again focus on climate change. Young people from across the UK gathered together to think about and discuss the challenges that key leaders face on this global issue. Working with local partners, the British Council organised a series of climate negotiation simulation events for students across the UK, coinciding with the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29), which took place in Azerbaijan from 11 - 25 November 2024.
These simulation events offered a face to face role-playing exercise based around the UN climate change negotiations using materials developed by Climate Interactive, part of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.
Students (aged 16-18) took on the different roles in this field: world leaders, non-governmental bodies (NGOs) and the media. Working in groups which represent a country, a region or a lobby group, the students took part in a simulation of a real-life climate negotiation. While each group looks at the issue from a different angle, they came together to produce a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep the global temperature from rising above 1.5%.
Through the simulation, participants explored the rate of change and level of action that nations must take to address global climate change. During the negotiations, the students’ proposals were fed into a computer programme, which uses real-life data to model what the consequences of the proposals would be. This gave students the opportunity to better understand how climate negotiations, such as the UN Climate Change Conferences operate. It also allowed them the opportunity to work with students from other schools to reach a consensus on the issue.
In 2024, British Council ran four new simulation events: in Edinburgh (31 October), Cardiff (6 November), London (7 November), Baku (17 November) and Belfast (19 November). Similar events took place across November-December 2023 in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Belfast and London.
