The podium at the annual United Nations Climate Talks has platformed a wide range of human emotions. From Greta Thurnburg’s “How dare you?,” directing her generation’s disillusioned anger towards the assembled global leaders, to Indigenous Amazonian activist Txai Suruí’s plea that "The Earth is speaking: she tells us we have no more time,” invited speakers have continuously reminded delegates of the gravity of their responsibility as decision makers of the planet’s future. Increasingly, speakers at the Conference Of Parties (COP)—the annual UN meeting designed to carry out the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gasses—are attempting to be a mouthpiece for future generations and non-human voices, because the countless beings that fall in these groups have no other representation.

When given a platform, young people at the COP almost always demand urgent, transformative action. This meeting has occurred for more than a quarter century, and every year, climate advocates plead for a turning point. Yet, every year, onlookers deem the talks at least a mild disappointment. 

With six years left to cut global emissions by half, the UN climate talks have failed to reach an agreement to fully “phase out” fossil fuels at some point, let alone make sufficient progress towards this urgent transition.

Unsurprisingly, the people—especially youth—facing the climate crisis are looking for alternatives to COP that could bring a new approach to negotiations and accountability. Alice Plane is one such renegade. As a diplomat heading the Climate Unit for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2016-2020, Plane quickly learned firsthand the frustrations of international climate talks. Her diagnosis of the problems with traditional negotiation is threefold:

 1) Delegates take an adversarial approach to negotiation. Because everyone enters the space having agreed with their respective national higher-ups on their preferred language for any agreement to be made, there is no room for real collaboration to take place in the meetings.

2) Only states are represented. Plane was tasked with speaking on behalf of France. But who and what constitutes France? Did she have the responsibility to speak for future generations of French citizens? What about migrants within French borders? Or even animals and plants living in what humans arbitrarily call France? Representing the full diversity of life within a territory proved impossible. Instead, she often found herself facing the expectation of speaking primarily on behalf of the French President and his administration.

3) The will to act gets lost along the way. Because of the previous two circumstances, representatives—many of whom have noble intentions to improve the fate of the planet—end up sticking to nationalistic and anthropocentric priorities that prevent transformative climate action.

Inspired by other young people she worked with at the French Ministry and activated by Brown students, Plane came up with a self-proclaimed “crazy” idea for a new model of climate talks that just might avoid these pitfalls: COAL.

Conference of All Life: Climate Negotiations in a More Than Human World (COAL) will take place at Brown University—where Plane is now Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs—on the weekend of April 12-14th, 2024. Over one hundred Brown students, faculty, staff, and alumni have signed up to take part in the immersive climate summit simulation. Plane and her team of undergrads and MPA students are very aware of the irony of the conference’s name, coined by undergrad Angela Wei. Coal, a primary fossil fuel responsible for degrading life on earth, now serves as an acronym for a climate negotiation simulation that will platform non-human and non-state entities. The COAL team has put countless hours into the “game design” of the conference, trying to craft a simultaneously playful and serious immersive experience that challenges participants to think in new ways.

Participants in COAL will be assigned to one of twenty-four delegations, which range from China to Coral Reefs. After receiving training on climate negotiations, participants will design the negotiation goals and methods for their assigned entity. What this will look like, Plane does not know, as she wishes to build on what participants will come up with in the negotiations room. The organizers hope that, through facilitation, creativity and curiosity will kick in as Brazil talks to Livestock or Future Generations make compromises with Artificial General Intelligence. 

The outcome of this simulation remains a mystery, but Plane hopes that delegates will reach some sort of understanding (although not necessarily unanimous agreement) on a Treaty of All Life. Plane refers to this outcome, if achieved, as a “Rio moment,” referring to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 where, for the first time, world leaders gathered to try to reconcile economic growth and environmental protection. While groundbreaking, the Earth Summit definitively centered human development in its approach to environmentalism. COAL could be the start of a similar paradigm shift, one that does not leave all but humans voiceless.

COAL’s radical idea of consulting Soil about how we should mitigate climate change seems more feasible given recent instances around the globe of the recognition of the Rights of Nature.

Predated by many indigenous traditions that have long recognized the value in non-human nature, Rights of Nature refers to the acknowledgment of non-human life to exist and thrive through some kind of official legal protection. This idea is quite new to Western law. In the US, the first recognition of Rights of Nature popped up in a small mining town in Pennsylvania, Tamaqua Borough. In response to corporations turning old mining pits into sludge dumping zones, the town passed an ordinance that attempted to strip corporations of their legal recognition and instead grant residents the right to “defend natural communities and ecosystems.” Although no similar progress has been made on the state or national level in the US, cities and towns across ten states have similarly recognized Rights of Nature. Led by Ecuador, countries in Latin America, Oceania, and Asia have also enshrined legal rights to ecosystems of great importance within their borders, including the Colombian Amazon and the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers of India.

The patchwork of Rights of Nature law emerging across the globe worries some analysers, however. Who gets to advocate for nature’s needs? Will this lead to a resurgence of preservationist policies that attempt to silo natural spaces while sidelining indigenous and local communities who rely on them? To answer these questions and further explore the reality of a world in which nature is recognized in court, scholars at the New York University School of Law began the More Than Human (MOTH) Rights Project, a collaborator in COAL. Using tools of the law, the MOTH project aims to “create a pathway for re-embedding humanity within the larger web of life that nourishes and sustains us.” In practice, this looks like arguing that a forest can have co-authorship and copyright ownership on a musical album or anticipating the legal consequences of research that is beginning to decode whale language. 

As with the upcoming Conference of All Life, a central question for MOTH Rights scholars remains who should advocate for non-humans and what should this advocacy look like? Some MOTH Rights thinkers have proposed that human stewards such as nonprofits or Indigenous people with a demonstrated interest in the wellbeing of a non-human entity could speak for this being. COAL will put this kind of representative advocacy to the test with its climate negotiation simulation this April. Participants will be encouraged to embody their delegation mentally but also physically. The organizers propose to hold workshops in which participants practice moving like the World Trade Organization (perhaps very stiff and tethered by expectation) or Mycelium (interconnected and expansive like this underground network of fungi microfilaments). 

While they may seem fanciful, more-than-human frameworks such as COAL, Rights of Nature, and the MOTH project push us beyond an anthropocentric worldview. As Alice Plane says, they “allow for a conversation that never can and will happen if we remain in a very rational, humancentric approach to multilateralism.” The ramifications of these conversations are immense, nebulous, and potentially transformative. Including non-State and non-human voices as important stakeholders at climate negotiations could loosen the sticking points keeping COPs from accomplishing major progress towards cutting emissions or stopping deforestation. Delegations representing Ice or the Amazon Rainforest, after all, do not have to prioritize sustaining GDP growth or winning an upcoming national election. These more than human voices can shift momentum towards prioritizing the long-term sustainability of all life.

But will COAL live up to its potential? While the organizers do not know, they are content with the uncertainty. Plane noted, “if there’s not a possibility that we fail then there’s not even a point of trying. If we’d already know what we’re getting, then what are we doing with whatever will happen in the moment when we’re there?”

COAL is a leap of faith towards a new climate collaboration ethic, but whether it sticks the landing or fails spectacularly, participants will certainly leave the conference having stretched their minds to envision a different future for our planet, and this on its own is a catalyst of change.

*If you are interested in registering for COAL, the sign up is temporarily still available.