The meaning of “we” in climate talks

Walking through COP31 in Antalya, I recognised people I remember from the extraordinary effort to bring the Paris Agreement across the finish line in 2015. Seeing them again was unexpectedly moving. Eleven years later, they remain engaged in the difficult work of turning a historic agreement into something tangible. Their persistence deserves admiration, although it also raises an uncomfortable question about how much remains unfinished.
By the first afternoon, Brazil’s proposed road map for transitioning away from fossil fuels was being referenced across discussions. I suspect that by the time COP31 concludes, it will have become part of the conference’s common language. This is how ideas gain momentum in international diplomacy. They enter conversations, are challenged, repeated, and gradually reshape what people consider possible. Yet there is considerable distance between a shared vocabulary and the political, economic, and institutional changes required to give it meaning.
Another experience in Antalya offered a different perspective on that challenge. At the launch of the first Culture Global Stocktake for Climate Action, EarthSonic opened with a performance involving a Bangladeshi artist, bringing music, water, and human experience into a conversation usually dominated by emissions, finance, and targets.
The stocktake itself is a fascinating undertaking. Developed through a participatory process, it seeks to inform the next formal Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement by examining how cultural knowledge, values, and practices shape climate action. It raises questions about whose knowledge counts, how societies understand responsibility, and what enables communities to act together.
We rarely consider culture as part of the infrastructure of climate action. Yet the values that determine what we protect, what we consume, and what we believe we owe future generations are learned and sustained through culture. A society’s willingness to change depends, in part, on the relationships and shared understandings through which people make sense of the world.
A conversation with a friend later brought these observations together. We were discussing collectivism and the individualistic assumptions that increasingly shape contemporary life. Much of our technology reinforces this orientation. Algorithms personalise what we read, watch, and encounter, sometimes transforming experiences that were once collective into separate versions of reality.
Personalisation has undoubtedly widened access to information and perspectives. But what happens when even our shared spaces are experienced differently by everyone occupying them? We may participate in the same conversation while encountering entirely different accounts of what is happening.
Interestingly, the Culture Global Stocktake explicitly raises concerns about algorithmic curation and its influence on cultural narratives and diversity. It made me think about the consequences of this fragmentation for challenges that demand collective responses.
Climate action requires cooperation among people who have different interests, histories, resources, and expectations of the future. It asks societies to make decisions whose benefits may not materialise for decades and whose costs are rarely distributed equally. Such cooperation depends on our capacity to recognise obligations beyond our immediate circumstances.
And yet, increasingly, the systems shaping our attention encourage us to interpret the world through the lens of our individual preferences.
Perhaps this is the question I will carry through the remaining days of COP31. We have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of measuring emissions, tracking temperatures, and assessing progress. But how much attention do we give to the cultural conditions that allow societies to pursue a common purpose?
If our experiences of the world are becoming increasingly individual, where do we learn to imagine its future collectively?