After a few hours of sleep, I woke up in Baku and headed to the venue. It’s a giant sports stadium! So, when you are walking to every country’s delegation office for your meetings, you are directed to go to specific rows and that is when it hits you. It is kind of a funny feeling, like you’re leaving your seat in row A to head to row G, as if for a hot dog and crackerjacks… but then you actually go to a meeting with Luxembourg’s climate delegation instead!

After a ton of meetings and panels I left for the reception at the Climate Action Innovation Zone. I learned about solar and wind energy capacity and battery storage, and realized I still have a lot to learn about energy! But to be honest, energy is not my direct focus at COP 29, I’m here to advocate clean energy yes, but primarily I am here to campaign for the inclusion of climate education. We want to see it integrated into all school curricula globally, and we want to see that as a firm promise in every nations’ National Determined Contribution, NDC.

Let me decode that a bit!

NDC’s are essentially the pledges that every country that signed the Paris Climate Agreement makes, outlining how they will combat climate change. We know that research paper after research paper has shown that teaching climate education is a huge help in this regard. I wrote my own report on this earlier in the year – Climate Education Vs. The Climate Crisis.

But here’s a summary of how teaching students about the climate crisis helps us all: firstly, it eases climate anxiety in students, it also teaches them to instinctively make ‘planet friendly’ choices, thirdly it enables them to decipher climate misinformation and lastly but perhaps most importantly of all it gives them the knowledge, inspiration and skills they will need to become part of a vast green skilled work-force. Because the green economy is exploding and REALLY needs green skilled workers, and of course a lot of that growth is in the renewable energy industry! Hence my interest in energy too!

At the reception I met up with other sister NGOs, met several companies all attending (many for the first time), and somehow managed to meet the former prime minister of Australia, the Honorable Malcolm Turnbull. We talked very briefly about Earth Day 2025. He was super friendly and incredibly charming and this is why the COP matters, you get to meet people, world leaders even, that you could never have access to any other way.

The reason 2025 came up is that it’s our 55th anniversary next year, so we have made the critically important climate issue of renewable energy the theme, around the slogan, Our Power, Our Planet. We are pushing the aim of tripling electricity generation via renewables by 2030. See energy is key to all of this! The world needs it.

But right now I need dinner and head off to meet with some of the EDO team, specifically Max Falcone, from Rome, and Johnny Dabrowski, from Poland, who is a student at the amazing Trinity College, Dublin. Great dinner but afterwards I got some much needed rest! Totally crashed out.