Hello and welcome to Outrageant Optimism, I'm Tom Rificarnak.

This week we bring you an update from COP28, including voices from the conference, describing

how we can still deliver an ambitious agreement.

Thanks for being here.

Hi listeners, hello from Dubai, I am the last man standing here, Paul has gone, Cristiano

sadly didn't come this year, although of course she's done plenty in her time.

And today we're going to bring you an analysis of what's happening in COP at the beginning

of the second week.

Now as you will know from the previous conversation this is a consequential COP, there's been an

enormous amount that happened in the opening days, however we still need to land the ambitious

collective agreement that comes out of the negotiated process in order to give the unambiguous

signal that we will not drop the ball on our watch on the global stocktake and we will

send the signal that we're going to get back on track.

So at the beginning of the second week, we know that there are a number of countries

still blocking an ambitious outcome on fossil fuels, on adaptation and on a range of other

critical issues.

And in support of delivering an ambitious agreement, a letter was put together that global

optimism played a role in and the B team played a role in many other different entities,

but in the end it was a collective effort of an enormous number of individuals and organizations

that was then delivered to the COP president and created in a significant way the political

space for us to move forward.

So we're going to describe today the story of what happened.

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