Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Paul Dickinson.

And I'm Fiona McGrath. This week, we explore what goes on at a COPP beyond the formal negotiations

and how COP30 might help us build the new green economy that is already rising across the world.

Thanks for being here. So, hey, Fee, good to be with you and Kristiano and Tom aren't here, but we're going to be

dealing, I think, with all sorts of different configurations as we kind of increase the

frequency of our podcasting. Is that correct? That's my understanding. I think particularly

as we're on the ground on the go in Baleem, there will be different ones of us popping in from across different areas in Baleem and Rio and Sao Paulo and potentially the UK.

I know you'll be flying over a little bit after the rest of us.

We're trying to work also on having like mobile sound systems in a car, there's a kind of limo, there's like a van, Persephone, I've got possibly a recording studio in a helicopter, there's talk of a small plane. Perfect, yeah, hopefully a blimp as well. Yeah, I love a blimp. Love a blimp. One of the things I think we're going to dig into a little bit today is this sort of broad notion of the action agenda. It's a kind of phrase that gets thrown around, but I believe we've pinned down

an official kind of meaning of it, right? What is the action agenda according to the powers that be?

According to, I understand, the COP 30 website. The action agenda is the pillar of the climate

convention that mobilizes voluntary climate action from civil society, businesses, investors, cities,

states, and countries to intensify emission reductions, climate adaptation, and the transition

to sustainable economies, as set out in the Paris Agreement.

The action agenda engages actors who do not negotiate agreements, yet are essential for putting them into practice.

Okay, so I think we've had this discussion a lot, but I think it's always good to just kind

of remind the listeners of a particular perspective, which I think we support, which is that

the big global agreement was the Paris Agreement, came in the COP in 2015. It sets this goal

of keeping us well below two degrees of temperature change, and it sets up this process of nationally

determined contributions and reporting against those. But what it doesn't do is more than that,

because in a sense it can't. And so the action agenda is really where the kind of baton is passed,

I think, from an intergovernmental process to what some people call the real economy, that's companies,

...