The COP29 debate that flipped the script on human development
*Note: All debaters’ quotes and points in this article do not necessarily portray their own personal convictions. Each debater was enacting a role in a debate for the benefit of the audience to help them stretch their own thinking on the topic.
On the first ever Human Development Day at climate COP, the UN High Level Climate Champions embraced an ancient form of human collaboration: a debate. Thanks to the Climate Champions and LinkedIn, it was also the first Debatable, curated by Kite Insights, on an official COP programme. I was privileged to work closely with the debaters on and listen deeply to their arguments. The motion? Investing in skills is THE commitment that counts.
What is Debatable?
Debatable is an initiative that we at Kite Insights started 5 years ago, and which Sophie Lambin, CEO & Co-founder, Kite Insights & The Climate School and our creative lead Sophie de Beistegui, have spearheaded. It is a format designed to bring complex and fraught topics to the fore, an invitation to listen deeply and to disagree agreeably, to better understand the other side, the critical nuances, and importantly pave a way forward.
Sophie moderated the debate at COP29 with Efrem Bycer, Sustainability and Workforce Policy Partnerships, LinkedIn. This was our third debate presented by LinkedIn, who are enthusiastic supporters of Debatable.
The human development debate
Surely, on a day when COP29 highlighted the role of people in sustainable transformation, the ‘For’ team arguing that skills are a vital climate commitment would win.
When Sophie and Efrem asked the audience if they were in favour of the motion, the vote was almost unanimously in favour. No matter the climate solution, it is ultimately people and their skills that will deliver it. Those with green finance skills will direct capital to green solutions. Research and invention will mainstream new innovations. Nature will be protected, laws made, and lives saved, all by people with the right skills. The ‘Against’ team had their work cut out for them.
But crucially the debate had not happened yet. And, crucially, the ‘Against’ team did not frame the debate as deprioritising human development. Instead, they raised the stakes: Are human skills the investment that will solve our cataclysmic climate predicament -- or is the change needed at a higher level, at the level of collective human consciousness? We will undoubtably require new skills but does investing in skills alone represent the scale of the human transformation we face?
We invited debaters to articulate arguments that might not necessarily align with their personal or professional beliefs, but that would stretch their own thinking and that of the audience.
Dr. Liesbet Steer, Senior Advisor, Systemiq* opened for the proposition by eloquently demonstrating how integral skills are to greening the workforce, delivering a just transition, and strengthening the human ingenuity that will help limit us to 1.5C. “Skills are a multiplier for climate innovation”, she insisted.
We have skills in abundance, yet clean technologies are not deployed at the rate we need, nor are we transitioning to a green economy as fast as we should. Perhaps the seismic shift is not in how many skills we have but in how and where we use them, as Dr Bonahis Oko, Sustainability Lead, Canon EMEA, argued. Dr Oko suggested that a skills approach is an elitist privilege and a luxury in the global south. Instead, she highlighted the need for investment in infrastructure to facilitate technology innovation by Africans and in Africa, otherwise we risk accelerating the ‘brain drain’. Lastly, she noted how upskilling takes time that communities, economies and ecosystems don’t have. In the last 20 years, for example, the temperature of the oceans has doubled leading to mass rainfall (think Valencia) and intensified storms (think Hurricane Helene). As Al Gore pointed out only days before this debate, what happens if this rate of increase is exponential?
Sellah Bogonko, HSC, Co-Founder & CEO of social enterprise, Jacob’s Ladder Africa, countered by calling out the green transition as the greatest upskilling opportunity for the African continent. She cited key statistics from the recent LinkedIn Green Skills report like how workers with green skills have a 54.6% higher hiring rate compared to others, to demonstrate how skills provide a secure path way forward for Africa.
It was at that point that the wider case for a profound shift in conscious emerged. Dane de Souza, Senior Policy Advisor - Emergency Management, Métis National Council, took to the lectern to captivatingly describe how the collective consciousness that we need (and many of the skills that come with it) has existed on earth ‘since before time immemorial’. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Indigenous communities possessed the knowledge and wisdom to live in balance with Earth’s systems and stewarded nature for tens of thousands of years, until colonialism and cultural genocide erased and distorted that wisdom.
Now, de Souza argued, if we do not shift our mindsets, we risk doing it all again with skills-based green colonialism: ‘Western’ ways of seeing the world that undervalue other communities’ wisdom and practices, and inhibit the expansive imagination of all peoples.
Next up on the ‘For’ side, Emma Cox, Global Climate Leader at PwC UK, made her best efforts to remind the audience that “people will be responsible for whether this transition succeeds or fails; skills underpin scaled solutions, prosperity, and resilience, and promote social equity.” Just as new skills in physics enabled Archimedes to invent new methods and mathematics, new skills can be the long lever that moves the world to a sustainable system.
However, Archimedes and Ancient Greece was not quite enough to seal victory. Dr. Kirsten Dunlop, Chief Executive Officer, EIT Climate-KIC, continued to emphasise there was more at stake to human transformation. What if, she argued, ‘skills alone cannot do it’? “We are facing a world of such non-linear change, uncertainty, volatility and extremes”, we cannot rely on more skills and new skills when it was dependence on skills that created the climate crisis. We need the wisdom to learn on the fly and guide the green transition toward a regenerative society, not skills. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, he had the skills to turn around, Dunlop pointed out, but he lacked the wisdom. And with that, the ‘Against’ team won the hearts and minds of the audience.
But while ‘skills alone’ may have lost the debate, human development won in a bigger way than we could have imagined. To address climate change, we need to shift our creativity, our culture, our capacity for compassion, our courage and our collective consciousness.
Paving a way forward
So, how might we shift human wisdom and consciousness? Surely knowledge, learning, storytelling and human development are key. Kite Insights has a growing focus on human development in our sustainability programmes, alongside other organisations such as the Inner Development Goals, the Inner Green Deal and experts like Dr Renée Lertzman (a Kite Advisory Board member).
While skills enable and provide leverage, they do not initiate or implement. It was not investing in new skills that helped us overcome the COVID-19 global pandemic. It was committed action with genuine intention: laws that were ratified; innovation by scientists; infrastructure to distribute solutions; and finance that paid for them. To be precise, it was the mobilisation of USD $9 trillion to address the pandemic. That’s $5 trillion more than the $4 trillion financing gap for reaching the Sustainable Development Goals.
The most important commitment, then, is not investing in changing our skills alone. As Zen Buddhism teaches, we can shift our consciousness at any moment. We can change our conscious now, and change how and where we choose to apply our skills. We can genuinely commit to and invest in building a sustainable future together.
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