Last week I was fortunate enough to attend COP26 in Glasgow, visiting the GreenZone on Sunday 7th and Monday 8th November . As a geography student and an advocate of sustainability and climate awareness, COP was an enlightening and eye-opening experience for me.

I felt that this year COP26 was a particularly momentous event. In the eyes of many, the most crucial time to take significant steps towards solving the global climate crisis. In David Attenborough’s words, “We need to rewrite our story to turn this tragedy into a triumph”.

At a personal level, seeing and hearing first hand, the collaboration of policy makers, corporations, academics, and indigenous communities helped me further understand the extent of the problems caused by climate change, to people all over the world. However unlike those who dispel COP as “blah, blah, blah”, I came away with a sense of tempered optimism, as you realise there are potential solutions (both in the short and longer term) which could be implemented through cooperation and efforts made by all parties involved, despite the obvious fact that they key goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5% seems an unlikely outcome.

I attended a multitude of talks on a range of climate-change based topics. One of the most interesting ones I found was ‘Unlocking Climate Solutions’. I was able to hear from members of indigenous communities, their view on climate change and the damage we do to the earth. The application of indigenous values (how they exist in harmony with nature), and how these could be applied to our lives in the western world, showed me how much we have to learn from other countries and cultures. In particular I believe, the collaboration with indigenous communities is something that is not widely discussed, and this talk made me realise how many components of the climate crisis and their potential solutions the wider population are not aware of.

Overall I came away from COP26, cautiously optimistic. I realise that we will not achieve net zero by 2050, that the commitment on a coal agreement was changed to “phasing down”, and that developing countries will only receive the $100bn in aid that was promised in 2020, by 2025. However I feel some progress was made – the COP pledges should limit global warming to 1.9 degrees, and $130 trillion has been pledged to green technology. I do believe more could’ve been done, but what I do believe COP has done is focus the minds of everybody- global warming must be addressed now.

A huge thanks to Antoinette Nestor (a One Step Greener COP26 ambassador), and other members of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge for making this possible.