The curtain has just fallen on Durban and, once What’s more, viewers have been disappointed at the premiere of a work that, as usual for this director, has not met the expectations of much of the critics. The latest work of the United Nations, COP17, (the promotional poster already says a lot…) has missed another chance for the climate theater acquires the significance that, from the scientific field, has been claimed for years.
Once again, the drama to which a large part of humanity may find itself doomed has turned into a comedy where the main actors, instead of performing chorally in a common recital, confront each other and overreact to hide their true interpretation from an audience that he is starting to get tired of this series of plays started almost 20 years ago.
The United Nations created the Climate Summit movement in 1992, launching a new line of interpretation that, from the beginning, attracted a multitude of stakeholders interested in combating climate change. After the premiere of COP1 in Berlin (1995) and COP2 in Geneva (1996), COP3 was one of the great milestones of the climate genre. Premiered in Kyoto (1992), the success of the work was such that it established a emissions reduction protocolthat would mark the trend to be followed by the community of actors in the following years, also conditioning the script and the plot of the rest of the works that were to come.
Even setting such precedents, for many COP3 is an overvalued work, since today it is evident that the Kyoto protocol has not managed to prevent the increase in emissions since 1990 from approaching 50%. Behind the scenes, climate scenographers sponsored under the brand IPCC have been warning for years about the risk that such an increase entails, signing up to four scripts focused on this subject (IPCC Assessment Report 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007) which, unfortunately, have hardly been taken into account when interpreting the following COPs.
After the inconsequential premiere of works such as COP7 (Bonn, 2001) or COP10 (Buenos Aires, 2004), the prolific career of the United Nations took its biggest bump in Copenhagen (2009), where COP15 premiered. This work, considered a true failure, came in principle to renew and reinforce the Kyoto protocol, but the more than 34,000 attendees, a historical record number of people at all the COPs, saw how the actors were not able to give the return to a non-binding text, without quantitative objectives, and without defined deadlines.
The public and critical disappointment generated by COP15 caused in Cancun (COP16, 2010) a mere transitional work was released which has ended up transferring all the attention to Durban, although without generating as much expectation as in Copenhagen: this year the number of people has been reduced to almost half, about 15,000 viewers. Many voices speak of the end of a cycle, of the needed renewal of the United Nations, a theater director whose credibility is increasingly undermined since she is unable to appropriate the authority exercised by the main actors from his company when doing theater.
The big emitters like the United States or China, very influential but rebellious actors, attached to the United Nations climate movement but who never followed Kyoto, have barely felt comfortable in the works of the United Nations, and in Durban they have tiptoed without arriving to exercise a driving role over the rest of the participating actors to establish a binding agreement to reduce emissions.
The actors of the school BRIC, with a remarkable interpretive potential, are acquiring more and more relevance but at COP17 it has once again become clear that they are not willing to interrupt their development at any price. For its part, the European Union, an actress of method, a fervent defender of Kyoto, is losing more and more specific weight, although its emission reduction strategy, almost an obligation due to its own few energy reserves, is yielding results.
Considering the exposed review of the United Nations career in the climate genre, we can conclude that COP17 has turned out to be, once again, a presumptuous work that should make its director reconsider the method under which the interpretation of the actors is developed. Some actors whose role is really modeled by their interests in energy matters, a fact masked from the general public causing us, as spectators, to attend the performance of a pantomimeinstead of a dramatic, serious and transcendent work.