Built by the Dutch in 1652, Chihkan Tower, is a famous landmark in Tainan.

In a few hours it will be the Year of the Horse, and I’m about to leave Taiwan after my six-month intensive Chinese course. One of the the last things I did before leaving Tainan was to visit the Grand Mazu Temple to pray for peace and good fortune in the coming year. I followed the advice and instructions of the temple-goers and it turned out to be a wonderful experience, both peaceful and calming. It involves a specific series of rituals that prescribe the order in which you navigate the different shrines, what you do when you stop at each one (give thanks, state your name and where you are from, say what you are praying for, then plant your incense in the burner).

Grand Mazu Temple in Tainan

Built in 1664, this temple is famous in Tainan, and it is a beautiful place. During the Lunar New Year it is full of people from all walks of life, of all ages, and the feeling of participating in a ritual that is both spiritual and practical is quite moving.

Studying Chinese in Taiwan is a feeling

I came across this quote:

Learning Mandarin (in Taiwan) unfolds through everyday encounters shaped by retro charm, nostalgia and human interest.

People often ask why you have chosen to study Mandarin in Taiwan, and I am not sure which set of answers they are hoping to hear, but mostly I will say that I find traditional characters more beautiful. Of course the answer is more complicated, but this thing about it being a feeling is actually spot on. I had always noticed that people who had studied Chinese in Taiwan were quite emotional about remembering their time there, and I was always curious to find out why.

Well, it turns out I don’t know how to put it into words, but I felt this tugging at my heart several weeks before it was time to leave. Every human interaction, every step, every tinkling of birdsong in the trees around NCKU felt like a string that was being pulled unbearably hard.

The character for turtle: on the left is the traditional version, on the right is the simplified version

Not having any neat explanation for this feeling, I will share a short list of some of my favourite things in Taiwan.

Favourite city: Kaohsiung. The green and cultural spaces + the old historic areas are an unbeatable combination.

Favourite cafe: 珈琲小美 （“a small good coffee”) inTaitung. Retro, slow, each cup of coffee is hand prepared and pre-tasted by the owner. Feeling plus.

Favourite massage: Bu Lao Song foot massage. This is a chain, and I’ve been to the one in Tainan, Taichung and Taipei. It’s a Japanese-style place where you soak your feet in a hot jacuzzi bath before the massage. As per their name (YoungMe), it is a reliable shot of rejuvenation each and every time.

Favourite museum: Southern branch of the National Palace Museum in Chiayi. Smaller than the original museum in Taipei, it is a lot less crowded and allows you the time to immerse yourself in each object.

It will take me some weeks to figure out how/whether to transition this newsletter now that my Tainan adventure is over. I’m keen to hear any feedback from you, please leave a comment below or DM me.

Happy New Year!

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Tainan Park, Beimen Road. Photo: Eric Scherer

Looking back

Winter in southern Taiwan is full of soft, deliciously warm days which make it a pleasure to walk slowly and enjoy being alive. There is some air pollution, and there are some cold days because of strong wind, but mostly its gorgeous and makes up for for the brutally hot months of September and October.

As my 6-month course wraps up in several weeks, I’m racing to complete the required coursework, while trying to make sense of what happened.

Kaohsiung Pier-2 by night. Photo: Eric Scherer

Another view of Kaohsiung by night. Photo: Eric Scherer

Creative tension between the Big Why and What

Stepping out of everyday life to do intensive language study is an exciting adventure. One thing I’ve noticed that the students here for the most part are motivated by a common set of goals - it could be one or several of these:

• Opportunities in Taiwan (study, research, work)

• Career boost

• A bridge to something new (end of studies, career break, life transition)

• “Who am I?” (identity exploration)

Only the first one is actually concrete, and the other three are more open-ended.

I subscribe to a mix of all the latter three, and I’ve found that my steepest learning curve has been how to balance the “Big Why” (with all its uncertainties), with the drive needed to stay the course in a fast-paced intensive programme.

To give a sense of what “intensive” means: Every student has 15 hours of class per week, plus 1-3 hours of homework every day, and two cycles of exams per semester. Every week you’re required to absorb and be able to use around 100 new words and expressions. Furthermore there are elective classes, 4 per week, all of which have testing and homework requirements.

This is a relentless cycle of input and output. And because it’s Chinese, the higher you go, the harder it is to see progress.

Last week, after mid-term exams, I heard myself saying: “I’m tired of feeling stupid.”

Japanese-style ice-cream shop in Pingtung. I loved the yakult and passion fruit flavours.

Revise the goal to nurture learning with joy

As a mature student, I face obvious challenges around short-term memory and processing speed. Accepting these was part of the adaptation process.

But, more importantly, I learned that adjusting and re-adjusting my own “Big Why” constantly has been the most helpful hack to achieve a balance that nurtures joy in learning.

“I want to speak better Chinese for work opportunities” is good for small talk, but honestly, as I near the end of this once-in-a-lifetime experience, my real goal is this:

To be able to browse for hours in a Chinese language bookshop, buy something and go home and have pleasure reading it without using a dictionary.

That’s it.

Zheng Da bookstore in Tainan

I’ve revised down significantly the kinds of authors I aspire to be able to read.

From the 18th century classic Dream of the Red Chamber (impossible),

to Republican-era Eileen Chang’s short essays (too much hidden meaning),

I have now (more realistically) moved to contemporary essays from Taiwan. (not easy either, but both satisfying and enjoyable)

Look for felt progress, not measurable progress

Progress measurement helps with motivation when you hit a wall, and I’m learning how to get a sense of felt progress that is distinct from grades and comparison with others. Taking more time on things (that aren’t graded), like writing characters, nurtures my ability to notice and pick up on more subtle signs of progress.

It’s the difference between sitting down to stare at a painting for a long time in a museum, instead of whizzing past 10 paintings in a few minutes.

For example, I was listening to a news podcast in Chinese, and a bunch of grammar forms we had studied popped out at me - before I would not have noticed them, and noticing them means that I have a more nuanced understanding of what is being said. Which made me happy.

Enjoying the winter sun at Gan Dan Cafe in Tainan. Photo: Eric Scherer

From Big Why to Big What’s Next

I wrote that because I don’t know what the answer is. Please stay tuned!

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Sunset at Cijin Island, Kaohsiung. Photo: Eric Scherer

After taking a train from Taitung to Fangliao, and spending two peaceful days at Dapeng Bay in Pingtung County, it was time to head to Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s biggest seaport.

The city took me by surprise, and I was sorry not to have more time to explore. Most of what I knew about Kaohsiung was the 2014 gas explosions that left 32 dead, and 321 people injured.

Today the city is known for many different things, art, culture, performing arts, the port, outstanding food and its old, historic neighborhoods. It’s a vibrant big city with a proud past that shaped the course of Taiwan’s struggle for democracy.

The former Hamasen train station. Hamasen is a historic neighborhood located in the southern end of Gushan District. Photo: Eric Scherer

Starting from the Hamasen (derived from Japanese, meaning “beach railway line”) neighborhood, which used to be the hub for railway and ocean cargo, and is today a vast walkable area featuring museums, street art, retail spaces and a rotating landscape bridge. It is also the gateway to the wharf which connects Gushan District to Cijin Island by ferry. Cijin Island has seafood restaurants and a popular beach bar from which you can view the gorgeous sunset.

Kaohsiung: a city on the frontlines of Taiwan’s struggle for democracy

In 1979, the Kaohsiung Incident was a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations that took place against a backdrop of martial law and a one-party state under the Kuomintang.

10 December, 1979: Pro-democracy demonstrations in Kaohsiung

Pier-2 Art Center, Kaohsiung. Photo: Eric Scherer

Lixiong Street, Gushan District, Kaohsiung. Photo: Eric Scherer

丸浜 Japanese soft serve ice-cream in Lixiong Street, Kaohsiung. The daily menu features 2 flavours that are announced on their FB page. On the day I went it was White Jade Matcha & Red Bean Milk. Photo: Eric Scherer

Located next to the Pier-2 Art Center, the Great Harbor Bridge is the first horizontally rotating landscape bridge in Taiwan. Photo: Eric Scherer

Shoyoen House, Kaohsiung. Built in 1940 for Otani Kozui, who served as advisor to Taiwan’s Governor-General from 1940-1945. Surrounded by high-rise buildings today, at the time it had views over sugar cane fields. Photo: Eric Scherer.

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Taitung’s stunning coastline has become an international surf hub in recent years. Photo: Eric Scherer

Where time and space stood still

Is it Hawaii? No, it’s Taitung on Taiwan’s east coast. I had heard rave reviews of the east coast as being a great place to enjoy nature. But nothing prepared me for the startling feel-good vibe of being surrounded by this particular combo of ocean, mountains, palm trees, soft breeze and endless skies.

“Coming to Taitung is more than just a trip, it’s a way of life.”

From Guo Pei-Ling’s guide to Eastern Taiwan

Fishing is popular along the coast between Hualien and Taitung. Photo: Eric Scherer

We took the train from Yilan to Taitung, it took a little over three hours and the journey was incredibly scenic, ocean on one side, mountains fringed with clouds on the other.

Taitung city itself is a big, sprawling, sparsely populated place, surrounded on all sides by mountains. We didn’t visit many places in town aside from a retro coffee shop with tastefully curated vintage furniture and objects, where the owner grinds and tastes each cup of coffee himself before serving it.

咖啡小美coffee shop, Taitung city. Photo: Eric Scherer

Taitung has the longest coastline in Taiwan, and its surfing community has grown fast in recent years, centred around the townships of Donghe, Jinzun and Dulan.

Happiness Kitchen, Donghe township, Taitung typifies the local vibe - healthy seasonal ingredients, communal tables, surfer clientele.

Chenggong township in Taitung, the largest fishing port on the coast. Photo: Eric Scherer

The East Rift Valley, which is located between the coastal mountain range and central mountain range, is famous for its golden rice fields. (click through to see the 2013 Eva Air advert featuring actor Takeshi Kaneshiro cycling through the golden rice fields of Chishang that launched a tourism boom in the area).

Rice field in Taitung county

Another local speciality is Taitung’s red oolong tea. Unlike most famous Taiwanese teas, which are grown in the high mountains, the Taitung tea is grown on the plains. The tea is distinctive for its sweetness and roundness, a honeyed flavour that stays on the tongue. The amber colour is also gorgeous.

Tea tasting at Biluoyuan Tea House

Biluoyuan Tea Plantation, Luye Highlands, Taitung county. Photo: Eric Scherer

Other than tea, surfing and tourism, Taitung is also known for its fruits. Driving aroung Luye highlands, we saw field after field of dragon fruit, pineapples, cherimoya and bananas. Every field was small scale, and set against a backdrop of mountains. Sleeping dogs along the roadside, butterflies everywhere, and the joy of being in a place where human impact has been minimal.

Dragon Fruit Plantation, Luye Highlands, Taitung county. Photo: Eric Scherer

More than anywhere I’ve been in Taiwan thus far, Taitung sums up the catchphrase that Taiwan is a “feeling”. It won’t translate perfectly through film or photo, you have to go there to feel it.

Coastline near Donghe, Taitung county. Photo: Eric Scherer

Next stop: Taitung to Fangliao on the “Breezy Blue” retro train. Stay tuned.

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Zhenfa Tea Shop, Minquan Road, Tainan

Last weekend was hot in Tainan, and I spent part of the weekend visiting small places that are well known for a signature product, or that sell only one thing. Tainan seems to excel in this field - and the aggregration of many many excellent micro stores and food stands is a big part of what makes the city both unique and special.

Some of these places are not easy to find, but when you get there, you know you’ve arrived because there’s a small crowd and they are intently choosing, standing in line, or enjoying what they bought.

Tainan’s oldest tea shop

Zhenfa Tea Shop, Minquan Road, Tainan

Tainan’s oldest tea store - Zhenfa - is 150 years old, and it boasts an impressive array of antique tea barrels which apparently feature old-fashioned classifications of tea that no longer exist anywhere else. I’m not a tea expert, so I bought one pack of green tea, and one of black tea. The packaging is incredibly beautiful, and somehow recalls mahjong tiles.

Tainan T-shirts from a retro Japanese barber shop

Tainan Kouran is the perfect Tainan shop - it sells unisex T-shirts with loud, retro Chinese characters out of a vintage Japanese-era men’s barber shop in a hard-to-find 2/F location off Guohua Street. Getting there is part of the fun - you walk through unlit corridors which feature a surprising number of retro coffee shops and bars, all somewhat Japanese in their vibe.

Tainan Kouran T-shirt store: the shop front doesn’t even look like a shop

The T-shirts have a distinctive “Tainan Man” vibe. The owner said he used to be a client when it was a barber shop, and decided to take it over when the owner retired.

Tainan Kouran vibe

Donuts from heaven

Haritts donuts, Tainan

We were looking for a place to sit down and rest from the heat and crowds, and the donut place was in a peaceful alley location. I tasted the white chocolate and raspberry donut, and the chocolate donut, and I was amazed at how fluffy, fresh and tasty they were.

Pretty soon there was a huge line snaking out of the store, and people sitting down to quietly unwrap their waxed paper and enjoy their donuts.

Turns out this place is a Japanese brand of donuts that has a cult following, and similar outlets in Taipei and Taichung, also in quiet back alleys.

I felt restored after an hour and a half here, drinking buckwheat tea and munching on donuts. I ordered two more on my way out to put in the freezer to enjoy on Monday.

The dog didn’t get a donut, but he still looks happy to be at Haritts. Photo: Eric Scherer

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Iconic Star Ferry, still operating from Kowloon to Central (and Wanchai) and back. Photo: Eric Scherer

Hong Kong is a special place. I’m always grateful for a chance to spend a few days there. It’s a short flight (1 hour 10 m) from Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Hong Kong became a part of China. But so many features of “old” Hong Kong endure, and I’m always startled to find them intact, amid all the changes.

The layered buildings one on top of another, a kind of skylessness that hangs over many of the densely packed bits of Central, Sheung Wan and Wanchai on Hong Kong Island.

Steps and hills everywhere, you’re always going up and down no matter where you are, and it keeps people fit and healthy.

The massive old banyan trees with hanging roots that populate the steep winding roads of the mid-levels and the trail around the Peak. It’s so peaceful to be near them, they generate a kind of deep silence.

Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong. Photo: Eric Scherer

The way it feels like a really old city in parts, there’s a tumble-down shabbiness in every side street that lurks behind a shiny building or shopping mall.

The way each neighbourhood is distinct, and each little segment is a mix of residential, and commercial.

View from the Peak. Photo: Eric Scherer

Tourists from China and other countries pack the typical hot spots like the Peak Tram, the West Kowloon promenade, the “legacy” buildings in Tsim Sha Tsui. Yet you can still hear locals, speaking quietly about everyday life in Cantonese.

The food, the food - it is still very good, but eye-wateringly expensive.

Restaurants are half empty even on Friday and Saturday night - Hong Kong people are out in Shenzhen or other places in the Greater Bay Area getting a better bang for their buck.

The Star Ferry. It still plies the harbour, but there are no more commuters, only tourists with expensive cameras.

Wanchai. Photo: Eric Scherer

Burd Street, Sheung Wan. Photo: Eric Scherer

Possession Street, Sheung Wan. In 1841, the British navy arrived at nearby Possession Point (now Hollywood Road Park) and began 150 years of rule, marked by a flag-raising ceremony the day after the initial landing.

Language and identity

Every time I visit Hong Kong I can’t help noticing that Cantonese is becoming less and less predominant. But I don’t want to engage with the “is it dying?” conversation. Rather I was curious to find out how and why it became the language of Hong Kong’s Chinese community.

As a child, I went to an “Anglo-Chinese school” and took Cantonese as one of many subjects. Except for Chinese, all the other subjects were taught in English. In those days, Hong Kong was so entirely cut off from China that I actually grew up believing that Cantonese was Chinese, that there was no other Chinese language or dialect that mattered.

In 1984, Robert Bauer, honorary linguistics professor at the University of H.K. and formerly professor of Chinese linguistics at the H.K. Polytechnic University, wrote:

For Hong Kong’s ethnic Chinese community, Cantonese functions as the community’s standard form of speech, its lingua franca and its predominant mother tongue.

Hong Kong’s Cantonese-speakers have been able to to develop their mother tongue into a prestige language primarily because they have been free of the prestige promotion of Putonghua, a linguistic situation which runs counter to that of other regional minority Chinese dialect speech communities in China, Taiwan and Singapore where the local dialect must compete with Putonghua.

This was a highly unusual situation, and something of an anachronism that was destined to change radically after 1997, when Hong Kong came under Chinese sovereignty.

Although what you hear in the streets these days is a mix of Cantonese and Putonghua, a 2021 official census showed that Cantonese was still the most commonly used language by the Hong Kong population.

However, the proportion of the population aged 5 and over who could speak Cantonese decreased slightly from 97.4% to 96% in 2021.

This chart shows that the most desirable linguistic paradigm today (representing nearly 70% of the population according to the 2021 survey) is to be “biliterate and trilingual” (ie be able to read and write both English and Chinese, as well as speak Cantonese, English and Putonghua).

Code-switching between Cantonese and Mandarin is hard for people who didn’t grow up that way. Inevitably, as when you switch from languages in the same family, such as French and Spanish, one tends to cancel out the other one. It is challenging, confusing and tiring to try to be simultaneously perfect in both.

Robert Bauer predicted in 1984 that: “Hong Kong Cantonese is just as much an anachronism as Hong Kong itself. When the political status of Hong Kong changes in 1997, the community status of Cantonese will be radically affected as well.”

So rather than cry over the loss, I prefer to celebrate the fact that Cantonese has persisted admirably throughout the past 28 years in post-colonial Hong Kong. No doubt it will be overtaken by Mandarin in years to come. Until then, we can still enjoy the works of filmmakers, songwriters and others who keep experimenting and creating works that are meaningful for the identity of Hong Kong Cantonese speakers.

Newly-wed couple dressed in traditional Chinese wedding “Kun Qua” which has become very popular in recent years. Photo: Eric Scherer

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Fruit stall, Chiayi

Chiayi is just 45 minutes from Tainan by local train, close enough to be a day trip. I’d heard that there’s a famous fish head soup place that was featured on Netflix’s “Street Food Asia”, and an interesting prison museum. Maybe not enough to fill an entire weekend.

This “there’s nothing to do there” narrative did not align with a book I picked up at Tainan’s lovely Zheng Da bookstore last week - 285 pages of things to do, see and eat in Chiayi.

A 2024 guidebook written by a Chiayi native who decided to go back to her hometown from the north during the pandemic

The author writes about “the strong salty sea breeze, the everyday life of ordinary people intertwined with temples and faith, the changing architecture of buildings and the wandering crowds through the streets and alleys” … combine to form the “multifaceted, uneven face of Chiayi”.

First of all, the fish head soup: it was quite an epic experience.

There is a wait, but it’s not crazy and inhuman like the soymilk places in Taipei. I waited around 15-20 minutes, and the vibe of the people around me was actually quite a pleasant excited anticipation. Inside there’s air-conditioning, comfortable tables and benches, and the soup is very fresh-tasting, full of vegetables, and you can order the famous Chiayi turkey rice to go with it, which was also delicious. You’re not supposed to bring outside drinks, but everyone seemed to be doing it, so I went ahead and got my own iced pomelo oolong tea.

Later I tried one of the famous nearby tofu pudding places: Pin An Soymilk Tofu Pudding (品安豆漿·豆花). I took the soymilk with tofu pudding and pearl barley, and honestly it tasted so fresh I felt like it had been made that morning.

The next day, I went to the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum, which opened 10 years ago, and is part of an effort to redistribute cultural heritage to the south of Taiwan.

The Taipei National Palace Museum is a gem, one could go there every day and never tire of its riches. But I also like smaller museums that are highly curated, because you can take your time to take in and process what you see.

In the centre, white jade teapot, Qing Dynasty (17th-18th centuries); Southern Branch of National Palace Museum, Chiayi

I fell in love with the lines of this Qing dynasty white jade teapot, which looks so very Art Deco. There was an outstanding selection of jades which went back as far as Shang Dynasty (2nd millenium BC), a “Ding” cauldron from the 13th-10th century BC and beautiful vases with pale green glaze from the Northern Song Dynasty (11th-12th century).

Moku Sho coffee shop, Lanjing Road, East District, Chiayi

My takeaway on Chiayi? Like Tainan, it defies any neat summary or description. The quality of everything I had to eat and drink was first-rate, the city itself was a sometimes confusing maze of scooters and pedestrians thronging the popular foodie hot spots, the museum was an architectural statement set amid the never-ending flat plains of southern Taiwan, dotted with sugar cane and palm trees. “Multifaceted, uneven” is definitely an accurate description. Oh, and, I would come back here happily to see more.

Iced coffee and earl grey pudding at Moko Shu coffee shop, Lanjing Rd, East District, Chiayi

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Dihua Street in Dadaocheng, the oldest street in Taipei

Since I started studying at the Chinese Language Center at NCKU in Tainan, I’ve noticed that most of the higher level classes tend to be dominated by students from Southeast Asia (Vietnam and Thailand) and East Asia (Japan and South Korea). I don’t really know how to say it any other way, they are just good at learning Chinese - fast, motivated and passionate about Chinese contemporary culture (music, movies, TV shows etc).

While numbers of students enrolled in Chinese courses in North America and Europe have been declining in recent years, the story in Asia is the opposite.

Southeast Asia is the leader on this trend, thanks to historical ethnic Chinese populations, deep economic ties with China and the impact of Chinese popular culture such as movies, games, TV shows and music. As of 2023, Indonesia has seen a significant rise in Mandarin learners, with estimates suggesting over 2 million students are studying the language, making it one of the highest in the world. Vietnam has also seen brisk growth in Chinese language learning: an important factor is the affordability of study in China and Taiwan.

Thailand has been the pioneer in integrating Chinese into the national education system. The number of schools offering Chinese grew from about 500 in 2005 to over 3,000 by 2022.

Compare this to the situation in Europe and North America. For example, in the US, the number of students taking Mandarin courses fell by 21% from 2016 to 2020. Similarly, in the UK, admissions to Chinese studies programs dropped by 31% between 2012 and 2021.

Curious to learn more about the motivation of some of my fellow students from Southeast Asia, I talked with two students from Thailand, 24 year-old Praewwanid (Becky), and 23 year-old Chayanis.

Praewwanid (Becky) at the Chinese Language Center at NCKU, Tainan

👉 Both took mandatory Chinese in school in Thailand at a young age, and found it hard, boring and uninteresting. But both fell in love with Chinese towards the end of high school, partly because of their interest in specific Chinese singers/bands/actors, partly because they realized that if they invested joy in their studies, they could quickly progress and get very good at it.

👉 Both agreed that English is indispensable, but Chinese is increasingly seen as the must-have third language after Thai and English.

Snail Alley, Tainan

It was a fascinating conversation.

“Chinese was so hard in the beginning, it made me feel uncomfortable, and my grades were bad. But my feeling changed after taking regular Chinese classes during an exchange in the US. I felt proud of myself that I can speak a language besides Thai and English.

“Once I came back to Thailand to study Business English and Communication for my bachelors, I took Chinese as my third language and I was really motivated. I watched a lot of TV shows, listen to a lot of Chinese songs and I learned really fast.” - Becky

“English is still the most important language … but now everyone has it. If you get a third language like Chinese, it’s good for your future.” - Becky

Chayanis Teerarach, co-hosting the Chinese Language Center language competition at NCKU, Tainan

“I got a university scholarship in Thailand, and I had a few choices, I chose Chinese. English is easier than Chinese, lots of people speak English in Thailand. At the time, there were more and more Chinese coming to Thailand so I felt it was good for my future.”

“Chinese is hard, it gives you a more of challenge.”

“I’d like to work for a Chinese company in Thailand, I don’t care what kind of work it is so long as I can speak Chinese and keep my ability up.” - Chayanis

Their stories made me reflect on my own language learning process, and helped me to understand the defining role of not just motivation, but the feeling you apply to your learning challenges. With joy and an easeful feeling, we climb the mountain with less effort.

Joyful learning in Taiwanese Hokkien

Names of fruit in Taiwanese Hokkien; the kiwi fruit is “kau-thau-ko” which mean’s monkey’s head - because of the hairy skin. How cute is that?

Of all the classes I take at NCKU, the most difficult by far is Taiwanese Hokkien. I regretted signing up for it almost immediately, because it became clear that I would have to double my efforts and time to just stay afloat - it is a totally new language for me, and there are no short cuts.

But I have noticed that the vibe in the class is actually playful, and this brings energy and joy to the process.

Perhaps the sheer difficulty (multiple tones, difficult pronunciation etc) has unlocked a collective feeling of “it’s not about succeeding or failing, we just have to try and laugh at ourselves in the process.” It is remarkable how every person in this class tends to give their all when trying to make the right sounds.

An added benefit of this class is that it gives a hint of the flavour of life here in Tainan, where you hear Taiyu a lot on the street, in shops, on the radio. Walking around Snail Alley in Tainan, I hear a lot of older people talking with their neigbours, conversations drifting out from the doorways, and even being able to catch the odd word feels like a precious gift.

A bar in Snail Alley, Tainan

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Taichung

Taichung is mid-way between Taipei and Tainan. It took me 38 minutes on the High Speed Train to get there. People say Taichung is like a mini-Taipei - buzzy, modern, convenient, and a bit soulless. It’s also a major food & coffee destination.

Went to a lovely cafe called “Bean Good Cafe” which has the most beautiful old-fashioned signage, hand painted like in the past to evoke a retro vibe. It reminded me of Hong Kong in the 1970s. Their pour over iced coffee was refined and delicious.

Small is beautiful in Tainan

The pace of life in Tainan is definitely slower than Taichung. What’s more, Tainanese people care deeply about small pleasures in life, notably food, and they have high standards. Their city is famous for an incredible range of freshly-made snack foods, and every stall owner prepares and seasons the food in their own unique way, making for a distinctive experience every time you go to a different stall.

Last week I tried a fried bun called jian shui bao 水煎包 which is sold next to my morning coffee take-out place. The owner urged me to try these buns, but confessed that their taste was a bit too bland for him. This opened the door to a conversation about the Tainan ethos on snack foods. Indeed, it seems that a lifetime isn’t sufficient to try every single one of them.

Jian shui bao from a shop on my way to NCKU. As the cafe owner predicted, it was fine, but lacking a bit of zest in seasoning.

The power of “I can” in Chinese learning

It’s not easy to internalise an “I can” mentality when it comes to Chinese.

Recently, I noticed that I was sliding into an “I can’t” mentality, and when I suddenly had to cope with revising for mid-term exams (five of them on successive days) plus the relentless onslaught of homework. I walked around for a week feeling like I was drowning, and on track for failure.

Indeed, an old friend commented on exams and how it’s hard, when you’ve been a high achiever as a young person, to let go of wanting to get good grades if you go back to school in later life.

Is there any way to bring back the “I can” mentality when you most need it?

One of my teachers, a woman who teaches the difficult Taiwanese Hokkien class, was also testing me for oral expression. She asked after the exam why I was in a class which was slightly lower than my vocabulary would suggest.

“I read too slowly, and every time I take a placement test I tend to underperform,” I replied. Indeed this is part of my “I can’t” mindset. I can’t read at the pace of subtitles on films and TV shows. So because I can’t get faster, I feel stuck, and then I give up.

She told me to start reading newspapers, and to focus on taking reading and writing courses in the next semester. This brief exchange of 3 minutes helped bring back the “I can” mentality, and the rest of the exams went just fine, the self-torture was over.

What happened? I felt seen, and this helped to realise that in fact, I can

Ximen Road in Tainan

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Taiwan celebrated its National Day yesterday, 10 October. This day commemorates an uprising in China in 1911 which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.

This key fact - a country’s national day celebrates an event that happened outside its borders - is just one of many details that signal Taiwan’s complex history, and the fact that its identity is constantly evolving, and embraces multiple strands.

As it was a public holiday, I visited the National Museum of Taiwan History here in Tainan.

Pluralism and the national narrative

The museum’s vision, as stated on its website, is:

We endeavor to be a space consisting of multiple dialogues that shape the cultural subjectivity, civil society, and cultural diversity of Taiwan.

According to the government website:

Taiwan is a multicultural society comprising diverse Han subgroups, as well as Indigenous Malayo-Polynesian peoples and immigrants from all over the world.

Where did Taiwan’s indigenous inhabitants (yuanzhumin) come from? There are three main theories on this:

1. From SE Asia (Philippines, Indonesia) - theory first mooted by a Dutch linguist in 1899

2. From China - according to this theory, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland were geologically linked in the distant past - which supports the argument that Taiwan is an indivisible part of China. In fact, there is evidence that during the Pleistocene ice age (between 24,000 to 12,000 years ago) Taiwan and the mainland were connected by land masses.

3. An American linguist in 1963 put forward the idea that if the first indigenous peoples did indeed come from the continent, they were subsequently cut off from it and gave rise to all the Austronesian peoples of the Asia-Pacific region. (aka Taiwan is the centre of the Austronesian world) Evidence for this is that Taiwan is the island with the highest concentration of Austronesian languages in the world.

More than 20 Austronesian languages have been identified in Taiwan, of those, 15 are still in use today.

Passport cover design as a metaphor for identity

In 2020, the parliament asked the Foreign Ministry to establish a new passport (right-hand version) which, compared to the previous version on the left, features a design that downplays the official nomenclature of “ROC” (Republic of China), and emphasizes “Taiwan”.

From a 2017 French research paper : “Travel documents and identification for nationals of an unrecognized state”

Taiwanese travelers are citizens of a state that is more than unrecognized: it has been disavowed in favor of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The cover of their passport reflects a broken and partly bygone historical trajectory.

UN Resolution 2758 which changed the course of Taiwan’s history

As of today, there are 11 countries that officially recognize Taiwan, among them the Vatican City & a handful of island states in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Dual narrative of Japanese colonial period

Between 1895 and 1945 Taiwan was under Japanese sovereignty.

At the museum, there is a rich and well documented section on this period, and there is clearly a dual narrative. On the one hand, the period is one of humiliation of the Chinese nation which ends at the end of WW2 when Taiwan is liberated.

On the other, it is remembered as a time of economic and social modernisation which put Taiwan on a historic trajectory that was distinct from that of China.

Notice the empty seat amidst the figures of 4 Japanese colonial police officers: it is for visitors to have their photo taken - an interesting take on colonial memory

Oh, and the Republic of China calendar. I learned this while opening a bank account here in Tainan. To my surprise, my year of birth was listed as 11 years prior to my actual date of birth. The reason is because Taiwan uses the Republic of China (ROC) calendar, which starts from 1912, the year the ROC was established, as a way to maintain its historical identity and continuity since that time.

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Shengli Road, Tainan

Nothing like getting away to see something with fresh eyes.

Arriving back in Tainan this evening after a 3-day weekend in Taipei, it felt good stepping out of the high-speed train station into evening air which felt softer than the air in Taipei. A lovely full moon hung overhead, reminding me this was the end of the mid-Autumn festival.

3 reasons I wanted to quit last week

Last week was Week 4 in my Tainan adventure, and I really wanted to quit. The main reasons were:

1. heat, humidity and low walkability of the city (sidewalks are often truncated so you have to walk in the road).

2. pace of the course and volume of homework - the 3 hours a day of homework was wearing me down, and I was starting to reject the rhythm

3. the Big Why - I no longer understood my own goal (is it to talk to shopkeepers and restaurant owners, or is it more ambitious than this?), without a goal I struggled to find the will to continue

   

   Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Taipei

2 things I noticed during a weekend in Taipei

Going to Taipei allowed me to see Tainan with fresh eyes. Coming from the south of Taiwan, as opposed to on a plane from Europe, it feels materialistic, buzzy and a bit soul-less.

Flags flying ahead of National Day on Oct 10, which commemorates a 1911 uprising that ultimately led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty & establishment of Republic of China in 1912.

1. Foodie-tourism is amazing and annoying

My hotel was right across the road from the famous Fu Hang Soymilk which is reputed to be the best Taiwanese breakfast place. People will stand in line for over one hour in the blazing sun to feast on a bowl of hot salty soymilk, a deep-fried dough stick (油條）and an egg pancake.

How long can you stand in line for this?

The queue for Fu Hang soymilk at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning. The people at the end of this line will wait more than one hour.

The hotel reception staff advised me to start queuing before Fu Hang opens at 5:30 am. This seemed inhuman, so I went there when I woke up, but already at 6:30 am the queue was nuts. I walked to the end of it and was about to join when a woman cut in front of me with her bicycle. People in Taiwan are generally very polite and very orderly about queueing. But something about Fu Hang makes people crazy. I pointed out that she had cut ahead of me, and she told me I was walking too slowly.

The guy in the blue t-shirt looks happy, but everyone else seems a bit “blah”

I walked to the top of the queue and asked a couple there how long they’d been there. 45 minutes. (ie since 5:45 am). “Is it worth it? Have you been here before?” I asked. “It’s okay,” they said.

I went back to the hotel, and asked the guy at reception: “Is it really that good?”

Well, their ingredients are high quality, he says, however because they have to serve large quantities of people, the youtiao (deep-fried dough stick) are prepared in advance (aka they’re not freshly fried super crisp).

Having failed to try the famous Taiwanese breakfast, I went to a famous coffee shop across the road, Simple Kaffa. This is the flagship store of Berg Wu, the first Taiwanese to win the World Champion barista competition. There are articles about how there’s a USD 635 cup of coffee on his menu. I got there at 9:50 am and there was a Korean couple with their roller suitcases waiting in line. Soon afterwards the line was about 15-deep before opening.

Simple Kaffa Huashan flagship store view from above

My coffee cost around 5.80 euros. The cinnamon sugar toast was outstanding.

In a way, I was missing stuff like this in Tainan. It was great to wander around Taipei for three days enjoying shaved ice, taro-filled scones and iced drinks. But I was surprised by how positive I felt about returning to Tainan.

2. It’s not a good Chinese learning environment

In Tainan, I’m using my Chinese every day to solve problems that arise in everyday life - trying to open a bank account, trying to find a place to live, trying to understand what the guy at 7-11 is saying when I buy a bottle of juice. But in Taipei, I find myself in cafes with high-design values and things on the menu like Tieguanyin Tiramisu and Pineapple Coffee Sparkling Water. And everywhere I go people reply to me in English regardless of how well or poorly I delivered my question in Chinese. By Day 3 in Taipei, I had given up even trying.

I was starting to miss Tainan already.

People in Tainan are proud to be Tainanese, and they maintain that Taipei is a city that doesn’t have a distinct identity, where people rush about in pursuit of money and status, where human relations are less warm, and where people don’t speak the Taiwanese language.

Sundown at Guanfu campus at NCKU, Tainan

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Sweet tofu, ice and tapioca at Anping Bean Jelly in Tainan

Jelly, ice and sugar in bowls

Nothing quite beats a bowl of sweet creamy beancurd floating on ice and squishy tapioca pearls on the side on a hot evening. I went to Anping Bean Jelly on a Friday afternoon to test the fabled sweet tofu, and found it delicious and refreshing, more textured than the soft almond soya beancurd I know from Hong Kong.

Grass Jelly from Hei Gong Hao in Tainan

Grass jelly is another new treat I have discovered in Tainan at Hei Gong Hao in Tainan - it’s a Taiwanese shop but they also have outlets in Japan. Black chunks of grass jelly - not sweet but not bitter either - topped with fresh milk and extras of your choice - mango, tapioca, red beans etc.

The importance of jelly

I wanted to love the grass jelly - it’s healthy (full of antioxidants), cooling, and not sweet - but found that I didn’t at first, it just tasted a bit off-key, as though I need more practice to truly appreciate it.

My family have said in the past that jelly is an acquired taste in general, something that people who’ve lived in Asia as children learn to love.

A book I came across called “Transparent dessert: the world’s most beautiful recipes”.

Why is jelly so much loved in Asia?

Apart from being a refreshing and hydrating dessert or snack during the long, hot, humid summers, jelly also scores high on aesthetics (transparent things are a canvas for artistry - such as the book cover above) and on texture (the chewy, bouncy “Q” texture which is an integral part of the boba tea magic)

Around the NCKU campus after the typhoon

How to fight joyless learning

At the end of week 3, my brain was a blur from taking in too much new stuff (idioms! grammar! exams in 2 weeks! daily homework!) and I decided to get a massage. “Why are your shoulders so tense from learning Chinese?” the massage therapist asked. “You need to relax and you will learn better!”

She was right. As novelty fades, routine sets in, and it’s too easy to default to joyless learning, that state where you’re trying to do everything at the fastest, most optimized pace which ensures that nothing will stick long-term in your brain.

Enter AI. It offers shortcuts to get to the destination faster. It cuts out some of the pain. But I’m pretty sure it fosters joyless learning which prioritizes speed over a slower, more immersive process.

My classes here at NCKU emphasize speaking and endless repetition of new grammar forms and vocabulary. Previously I had taken classes at INALCO in France and the method there emphasized reading. In the final year of the cycle there was an abrupt shift from high beginner/low intermediate to reading difficult (literary and contemporary texts). This sudden shift led me to use AI a lot, especially to prepare for exams, and in hindsight I get the sense that I learnt almost nothing during that time.

Moreover, relying heavily on AI to read difficult texts and generate written work at a higher level gave me a false impression of my level in Chinese, and the placement test for NCKU here in Tainan was a reality check.

No, you are not joining the class where they debate topics like freedom of speech and read newspaper articles. You are going to the class where they discuss why PhDs are selling fried chicken and whether feng-shui is nonsense or scientific.

AI removes the struggle which, in the moment, feels liberating, but which deprives us of the mastery which is key to the satisfaction and joy of learning a language.

In “The End of the Essay”, Hua Hsu reflects in the New Yorker on whether AI has destroyed college writing. He describes his teaching method:

“My classes are small & intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale.”

I thought of this quote as I reflected on the blur of the past three weeks. The teachers here bring tremendous energy to the classes, and everyone is given an equal chance to speak, fail, and try again. It is high-touch human-centric work.

In a way, the road to more joyful learning probably starts with being grateful for that energy.

Friday night near Hai’An Road in Tainan

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Old & new co-exist to create the unique Tainan vibe

At the end of Week 2, I was starting to have doubts about the existence of “foodie Tainan” and “slow Tainan” which are the main focus of most content available online and in print about Tainan. Foodie Tainan is what YouTubers focus on, and Slow Tainan is celebrated in Japanese design magazines and illustrated books on Tainan.

Amidst my daily routine of going to class, the library and the canteen, I started to wonder whether it was all just an invention of the content creators. After all, NCKU is not that far from the historical centre of Tainan, but the stuff around here is not going move any YouTubers to tears, that’s for sure.

This is from the back cover of a book called “Tainan way of life”

Cafes, secondhand bookstores, art galleries and inns nestled among the old houses are becoming a subtle part of everyday life, allowing people to experience the beautiful fusion of old fashioned charm and modern trends.

A fellow student from Japan who’s doing his PhD here, and knows his way around, suggested going to a beef soup place on Friday.

Tainan is famous for its beef soup which boasts local beef, sliced wafer thin and cooked in a broth made from beef bones, served with white rice and dipping sauce.

As soon as I tasted the broth - gingery, clean-tasting yet with a hint of sweetness - I understood the fuss. The broth was delicious and warming, and landed like a friend you’ve known for years. The place was full, but there was no pressure to eat fast. It was my first experience of the elusive Tainan slow life.

Tainan beef soup from A Lian Beef Noodle Soup

Confucius Temple, built in 1665 as a centre for classical education

Sunset on Qianfeng Road, East District, Tainan

What is Taiwanese, & why it was a mistake to take this class

My first lesson in Taiwanese: the middle column is the fiendishly difficult romanization

Southern Hokkien (Taiwanese, Minnanhua) is one of the southern Chinese regional languages. Some of my classmates signed up for the beginner’s class, and, without thinking it through, I joined them. My thought was “I can speak a different southern Chinese regional language (Cantonese), so how difficult can another one be?”

Big mistake.

I immediately hit a wall with the homework. Couldn’t figure out how to do it, didn’t understand the romanization system, found the online dictionary incomprehensible. It was like finding out you’ve been thrown into advanced math without prior consent.

I reached out to the teacher for help, and when she learned that I had a Cantonese background, she advised me to swap out. “You’re going to get very confused, and your Mandarin isn’t stable enough so it will impact your grades as well.”

It was the first time that I had heard any teacher acknowledge the real difficulties that Cantonese speakers face learning Mandarin. The things that are the same don’t necessarily help so much, and the differences slow down your progress. It feels like a limbo of being caught between 2 things, not quite understanding everything, and not quite knowing how to climb the ladder.

Even the Vietnamese and Thai students complained. There are too many tones (8 in total), tons of rules and exceptions to those rules (tone changing) and a deficit of standardized learning materials.

I ran to the admin office to beg to change the class for something else, but it was a hard “No”. That means 10 more weeks of Taiwanese. It will be interesting.

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National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Kuang-fu campus

National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) was founded in 1931 during the Japanese era, and has a beautiful, spacious campus full of ancient trees, elegant colonial buildings, and well-known science and engineering schools.

The Minor West Gate was built in 1725, and is one of the longest segments of what remains of old Tainan city, much of which was demolished during the Japanese era. It’s a lovely way to enter the Kuangfu campus.

The language centre is located in the Kuangfu campus. I’ve been here a week, and have been slowly settling into and adapting to a new routine centred around 18 hours of Chinese class a week. Here are a couple of things I’ve learned so far.

“Slow life” is earned, not given.

One of the reasons I chose Tainan was the hope that it would offer a slower pace of life and a more robust language learning environment (aka not much English) than Taipei, which is faster-paced and more international.

Amidst the shock of the heat, the absence of signage in English, a less developed public transport system (no metro), I found myself thinking: “Why am I here and not in Taipei?”

That feeling of impatience, discomfort, not wanting to tune in to what’s there and constantly missing what’s not - I realized after a few days that this is what was standing between me and an appreciation of what’s here in Tainan.

Heat, heat and heat

OK I knew it was going to be hot, but I’m used to cities like Hong Kong and Taipei where you can easily shelter from the heat by diving into a metro, an air-conditioned coffee shop or tea room, a mall. Here in Tainan the area around the campus is a gigantic grid of big intersections with no trees. Waiting for the green light to cross is like being inside a rice cooker. Even the UV umbrella doesn’t help much at noon.

So I have learned to find pit-stops everywhere to break up any journey of more than 10 minutes on foot. Here’s my favourite on-campus coffee and tea place, The Pool. Their kumquat, osmanthus, lemongrass tea with ice is a lovely heat antidote.

The joys of “slow writing”

One of the main complaints students have concerns the use of traditional characters. They have many more strokes, take longer to write and, above all, most of the Chinese studies programs in universities all over the world don’t teach them.

As a child growing up in Hong Kong, I had to learn and write traditional characters. I hated them. The day I quit formal Chinese class at my school was my “Liberation Day”. I was 10, and so happy to be done with feeling ashamed of my characters, getting D for calligraphy, the dreaded after-school tutoring, the tedium of trying to squish all those strokes into the tiny square box. I remember thinking: “Never again.”

This week, I’ve been writing all my homework by hand in traditional characters and it does take ages. But after spending more than an hour and a half on a 2-page assignment, I suddenly noticed I felt good. I had been so immersed trying to keep the characters neat, and not let my wrist just slump into the void, I hadn’t even noticed the time passing, or felt stressed about how to dodge the heat to find my next meal.

Notes from my chengyu (traditional 4-characher Chinese idioms) class

That’s it for Week 1. It’s been tough, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be here. It is a great learning environment - teachers, fellow students, the well-endowed campus - my brain is fried from adapting, but I’m also grateful for this newsletter which helps me to put a few thoughts in order. See you all next week!

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Credit: Photo by Arawark chen on Unsplash

Thank you to everyone who has followed The Zeroist since I got started back in 2021, as well as everyone who listened to podcasts from New Climate Capitalism.

The Zeroist went on hiatus last year due to work commitments and earlier this year, in view of the new global context I decided to shift my focus in the short-term. Hence the name change. The Zeroist becomes The Tainanist as I will be taking time out for the rest of 2025 and part of 2026 to further my Chinese studies in southern Taiwan.

I will be documenting every day life in Tainan, the so-called “Kyoto of Taiwan”, cultural hub and foodie hot spot of the island nation.

Although I won’t post explicitly on sustainability, I don’t plan to leave the space. I am simply taking a break to come back next year energized and refreshed.

In the meantime, I wanted to give a heads up so that those who have no interest in the new content can unsubscribe. If, however, you decide to stay on: thank you! Check out the updated About page for a fuller description of what I’ll be writing about.

I will start posting in September and aim to publish every week on a Friday.

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Best of Summer 2025

“Mini-ikebana” exhibition at Maison de la Culture du Japon:

“mini-ikebana” encapsulates everything I aspire to in 2025/2026

I spent the summer in my usual place in southwest France, and aside from the ever-increasing interactions with extreme weather, wasps, hornets, mice, palm-tree moths and much more, there was also plenty of “happy to be alive” time and “healing down time” that took place alongside the Holocene weather days that we are now so deeply grateful for when they happen.

Best reads

“Zeno’s Conscience” by Italo Svevo. Set in Trieste, the first person account of a neurotic, chain-smoking man between the wars recording his life for the shrink. It sounds awful but it was the best thing I have read in years, totally immersive and an original voice.

“Howard’s End” by EM Forster. The plot is contrived and silly, but it is profoundly moving, notably on the unseen aspects of human lives contained in the built environment and in nature.

Best movies

“Our Time Will Come” a 2017 movie by HK filmmaker Ann Hui about the resistance movement in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. It is slow in the beginning, but the acting is first rate, and it shows a little-known detail of the history of Hong Kong.

“Devi” by Satyajit Ray. Tragic, shocking tale of a woman forced into sainthood by her patriarchal father-in-law who dreams she is a goddess. Stayed with me all summer.

If there’s anything you’ve always wanted to know about Taiwan, requests for reading recommendations on history, literature and society, or anything specific you’d like me to write about, please leave a comment!

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Photo: Kiara Worth for UN Climate

Much has been said about COP28, and a lot of the media coverage is dominated by a focus on the “historic” character of the first-ever mention of fossil fuels in the Global Stocktake “flagship” text, which signals the end of an era.

This either/or is a typical default of the media, but it illustrates a deeper misunderstanding of how the COP process has evolved since 2015. Take this question from The Times Environment Editor to his followers on Linked In:

The media, are of course, a vital piece in what some experts call the “performance” or “dramaturgy” of the post Paris-COPs, which marked the transition away from legally binding frameworks to voluntary commitments.

In the current era, COPs are, according to climate governance expert Stefan Aykut, “increasingly staged as signals for a global audience. The strongest signal is commonly believed to come from the final decision.”

One way to make sure that the signal lands effectively, is through the staging of the event. (In 2015, legend has it that COP21 President Laurent Fabius and Environment Minister Segolene Royale argued bitterly for months to agree a colour for the wallpaper at Le Bourget). The UAE Presidency hired armies of PRs and consultants to use this event to bolster their soft power and deepen the image of themselves as some kind of eco-futurist model - and, in many ways, it worked.

Visual branding

Photo: Kiara Worth for UN Climate

Part of the seduction campaign came down simply to the visuals of the event: the traditional shots of diplomats in rooms either arguing or celebrating were offset by idyllic outdoor tents, palm trees - climate negotiators, NGOs, media and lobbyists in a balmy, corporate kind of Burning Man. There was a less of a sense of “us and them”, and even the traditional North-South face-offs were muted by the UAE staging.

For example, a lot of the impromptu conversations at COPs typically take place as people sprint from one pavillion to another - but here the pavillions were islands unto themselves, separate rooms. Less contact, less friction?

Success vs failure

The success vs failure narrative of mainstream media coverage tends to limit a deeper appreciation of the value of such mega-events.

If COP28 was a music festival, we could say it worked because more people came than ever before - nearly 100,000 badges were issued, almost doubling the number of participants who went to Sharm El Sheikh last year for COP27, the previous largest.

If COP28 was a trade fair, it was a winner because of the excellent logistics - nobody complained about difficulty getting food and water (which was the case at Sharm El Sheikh), the venue was vast, but golf carts were available to seamlessly convey delegates from one panel discussion to another.

Photo: Kiara Worth for UN Climate

But on the content of the outcome, things get fuzzy.

This parody on X sums up the position of the “failure” narrative.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember when evaluating any COP is to go back to what it is, and what it is designed to achieve.

One way to think about any Conference of the Parties is as a giant committee meeting. It’s easy to criticize such a process if your starting point is: this process should solve global problems and ignite transformative change.

Stefan Aykut, the climate governance expert mentioned above, offered this analysis in a thread on X.

So what can #COP28 achieve? It is important to acknowledge that in a world as divided as ours, a COP cannot solve all global problems. COPs cannot be at the forefront of debates. They only formalize what national publics & politics are willing to concede.

What COPs can do, however, is to contribute to ongoing processes of change & support local action & national struggles through global targets, legal norms, political agenda setting & media attention.

French economist Maxime Combes also shared a helpful thread reminding us that there are multiple ways to analyse the outcome of this COP, notably the second point below, which says “the paragraph (referring to fossil fuels in the Global Stocktake) is the (implicit) acknowledgement that the silence in the Paris Agreement on fossil fuels is unacceptable and problematic”.

He recalls that a COP decision does not have the force of an international treaty, and therefore the reference to a transition out of fossil fuels does not require any member state to limit or ban exploration or exploitation of fossil fuels on their territory.

To sum up, a key insight from Stefan Aykut’s work is the fact that since COP21 in Paris, climate summits are “not only designed to produce legal text, but also at crafting narratives and symbols to influence the expectations of politicians, investors & civil societies.”

👉 In this new system, COP Presidencies have an important role: they can shape the dramaturgy of a COP by using their formal prerogatives on agendas, communication and design of the venue.

The proof of success for the UAE from this perspective? Look at President Sultan Al Jaber’s expression in the photo below.

Photo: UN Climate; Sultan Al Jaber, COP28 President; Simon Stiell, UNFCCC Executive Secretary

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Thanks for reading. It’s been a busy end of year, and I’m taking stock of where the newsletter is heading in 2024. I would love to hear from you on what you’ve enjoyed, and what you’d like to see more of, so please do take a minute to hit reply with your feedback, or leave a comment.

Happy holidays and see you in January 2024.

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Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to The Zeroist, a Substack about the big conversations that are happening on the road to net zero emissions. Thanks for reading.

In this issue: A report you definitely missed last week, and why telling the story of water and climate is so important, plus news from the latest floods in the Himalayas.

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What you missed last week, and why it matters

Water disasters are everywhere, and the images of floating cars, collapsing bridges and submerged subway stations have become so commonplace that it’s hard to recall which country the last one happened in.

But in case you’re thinking “I don’t live in a flood risk zone”, think again. Last week the World Metereological Organization released its second annual report on global water resources, warning that the global water cycle is spinning out of balance.

That means a lot of things are going awry, so whatever you think you know about rainfall patterns in your area is probably no longer relevant. What we do know is that rainfall is now increasingly erratic, extreme weather events are getting more frequent, and more intense (and the government agencies in charge of early warnings are really, just, not on it), and that one-off events are now the norm.

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What is an out-of-balance water cycle

A water cycle spinning out of balance sounds alarming. But it is also quite abstract. When was the last time you saw a major climate report come out with a headline that focuses on the carbon cycle?

People assume that climate change is hard to understand, but they may not think the same thing about water, and yet it is also hard to understand, and hard to communicate. In fact, both the water cycle and the carbon cycle are Earth processes that play important roles regulating the planet’s climate and sustaining life. And the climate crisis plays into the water crisis in multiple ways which we get to see playing out in the form of water-related disasters that are proliferating and intensifying the world over.

In an editorial in June on How climate change alters the water cycle the journal Nature Water, wrote:

We might all hope for a definitive answer to the question of whether there will be more or less water for us in the future, but the reality is too complicated to be explained by a simple answer.

This is quite a new challenge for people who work on communicating environmental change and sustainability. The job of explaining the water crisis in a way that accurately reflects the interactions with climate change, and then the policy change that should accompany this new understanding, is a work in progress.

Climate change is not just about getting drier or getting wetter when it comes to water availability. We should work towards a more comprehensive process understanding of the water cycle that accounts for human actions. (Nature Water editorial)

Last month I wrote about the planetary boundaries, and how the search for effective storytelling metaphors and tropes has evolved over the years.

Right now there is a grand challenge to find, quickly, an effective way to communicate the interplay between water and climate so as to overhaul the business as usual approach which assigns a third order priority to water - coming after climate and nature, and focused largely on questions like local impacts and disaster risk.

Although conservative in its policy recommendations (more data is needed for more early warning systems), the WMO report does a good job sounding this alarm on the climate-water question.

WMO Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas:

Glaciers and ice cover are retreating before our eyes. Rising temperatures have accelerated – and also disrupted – the water cycle. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. We are seeing much heavier precipitation episodes and flooding. And at the opposite extreme, more evaporation, dry soils, and more intense droughts.

The report provides an overview of countries worst-hit by water-related disasters in 2022, and points out that none of them had timely and accurate hydrological data available to support evidence-based decision-making and early action.

Glacial Lake Outburst Flooding

Earlier this month, a glacial lake outburst caused flash floods in the Himalayan region of Sikkim. This sudden overflow in the South Lhnonak glacial lake led to a flash flood in the Teesta River, which then destroyed a dam in Chungthang, 60 kms downstream, leaving at least 75 dead, more than a hundred missing and washing away hundreds of houses, roads and bridges.

What is a glacial lake outburst? Speaking to Carbon Brief, scientist Jakob Steiner gave this description of the Sikkim event:

Part of the slope next to the glacier fell and crashed into the lake like the wall of a house, creating a tsunami wave that eventually managed to overtop and erode the dam.

He added that permafrost has been thawing in the region and destabilising the barriers that once held the two kilometre-wide lake in place.

According to a paper published in February, some 15 million people globally are exposed to impacts from potential glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), and more than half of the most exposed population live in 4 countries: India, Pakistan, Peru, and China.

Scientist Dr Ashim Sattar, who modelled the Sikkim glacial lake outburst flood in a 2021 paper, gave Carbon Brief, gave a succint (and heartbreaking) summary of the paradox facing those on the frontlines of climate impacts today:

We don’t have the money or the capacity to keep putting in these early warning systems, while we keep putting more CO2 in the atmosphere.

According to a report in June from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, Himalayan glaciers could lose 80% of their volume by the end of this century.

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s Collapsing Dams

The chain of destruction seen in Sikkim highights yet another water-related problem that is set to ramp up in coming years. Jeff Opperman, WWF freshwater scientist, wrote an explainer thread that unpacks the threat of collapsing dams. The recent floods in Libya that led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people resulted from the collapse of two dams which were nearly 50 years old and not well maintained. However, the dam that collapsed in India was only ten years old.

Just a reminder that this newsletter is a free labour of love, and if you have enjoyed this issue, feel you learned something, and would like to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee.

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Sunset, Dubai. Photo by Omar Yehia on Unsplash

The drum roll of reports and papers that are designed to pave the way to the upcoming COP28 in Dubai have begun. If you’re not a working reporter on the climate/environment beat at a major media, consider yourself lucky.

Top of the pile is a preview of the upcoming energy outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA), saying that fossil fuel consumption will peak before 2030 and fall into permanent decline as climate policies take effect. It projects that world demand for oil, gas and coal will begin to decline this decade.

Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, writing in the Financial Times, said that “the world is on the cusp of a historic turning point.”

Those words set the tone for the annual September pilgrimage to New York of thousands of climate elite-type people for pre-COP momentum building: the UN Climate Ambition Summit, New York Climate Week, the UN General Assembly and the SDGs Summit.

One of the pieces of doomsday coverage that stood out last week was reporting on the latest scientific update to the planetary boundaries framework. More than any other piece of climate news, this one stood out in terms of the intensity of the language used, and its ability to generate raw reactions from readers.

So, for this month’s newsletter, I decided to try a different tack. Instead of the usual highlights from the sustainability agenda, I’ll do a dive into the coverage of the boundaries framework over the years as a way to reflect on how the media has changed the way it covers planetary issues.

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14 years of planetary coverage: from guard-rails to blood pressure

One of the unsung victories of science communications that is attributable to the original planetary boundaries team is the shift from covering the environment as a “beat” among others, to the notion of “planetary coverage”. Although we don’t have evidence (yet) of a planetary beat at the world’s leading media organizations, there are early signs of this trend. For example, Agence France-Presse recently named a “Future of the Planet and Science” reporter based in Bangkok.

The latest coverage of the 2023 update to the boundaries framework was high-pitch intensity scary, and it’s hard to see much scope for progression. We may indeed be running out of words for this. Nevertheless, not everyone covered it. Both the New York Times and Le Monde abstained, while others, such as Bloomberg, the Guardian, the Financial Times, went full-tilt.

What is it, and what was being updated?

In 2009, a group of researchers sought to define planetary boundaries with thresholds or tipping points in the Earth system that threaten the current state. The main idea was to come up with a set of principles, or “guard-rails”, that would reduce the risk of crossing those thresholds that could push the Earth system into a new state.

At the time, they calculated that three of the nine boundaries under consideration had been breached - climate, biodiversity loss and nitrogen use. In 2015, an update concluded that four of the nine boundaries had been transgressed, with land use as the new addition. The latest 2023 update is significant because all nine boundaries have now been quantified, including “novel entities” which represents chemicals such as plastics, DDT, PFAs. That boundary, along with freshwater, has now been breached, bringing the total of boundaries passed to six out of nine. The areas where humans have not yet exceeded boundaries under this framework are: ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading and ozone depletion.

This iconic visual gives a snapshot of that journey from 2009 to today.

Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023

Yet, one of the trickiest elements of the framework and perhaps the most confusing one for the media to capture (the diagram doesn’t help) is that each scientific step forward in this journey is more about understanding interactions among the different areas - rather than about crossing borders into some inchoate, terrifying, indescriptible zone. (although, of course, it is legitimate to worry about the latter)

Ultimately, there are 2 stories here: a science story and a media story.

The science story is more of an arc from minimum viable product (2009), through a years-long process of receiving developer (scientific) feedback to completing the finished (2023) version.

The media story is different: I’d argue that the way the media have responded to the successive updates to this framework is a story about how it has changed its approach to the planetary story. This may explain why organizations with a long track record of covering planetary science (NYT and Le Monde) decided to pass this time - no new scientific insight. Whereas others, such as Bloomberg, chose to “big” up this story into something that could weigh in on the current fossil capture of the climate action space. (COP28 will be primetime for the new sport of conflating “carbon dioxide removal” with “climate action”.)

The “sick patient” language really works compared to “safe operating space” or “guard-rails”

Everyone knows what it means to fail your annual health check. It means change, usually unpleasant. Those changes may or not bring you back to full health and well-being.

Here is the Bloomberg headline: “Climate Change Sends Most Indicators of Earth’s Health into Danger Zone”. The sick patient metaphor is used to compare the update to a “full fitness examination on Earth.”

Here’s a quote from one of the lead authors: “We can think of Earth as a human body, and the planetary boundaries as blood pressure. Over 120/80 does not indicate a certain heart attack but it does raise the risk and, therefore, we work to reduce blood pressure.”

Compare this with the 2010 language where Johan Rockstrom demonstrates in his TED talk the impact of human pressure on the planet by sitting down on an inflatable globe. Once you’ve seen this, it gets harder to layer on the boundaries as blood pressure thing.

Keep ramping the language to the max - “global boiling” is another 2023 example

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has top-notch speechwriters, and he has coined a few phrases which are go-down-in-history memorable - such as “half of humanity is in the danger zone” & “atlas of suffering” for the IPCC’s report on adaptation last year. This year he coined “global boiling”, which seemed like an end-of-career choice given that there’s nowhere to go after you hit the boiling point. I didn’t love global boiling, but it sure worked with the media.

The way we talk about planetary boundaries has come a long way. Back in 2012, the US delegation at the Rio + 20 Earth Summit made sure to strike all references to this term from the outcome document, “The Future We Want”. This was standard practice for them vis a vis any term that was seen as not well known, or not sufficiently researched. In fact, they fought an earlier, similar, crusade ahead of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to make sure its official name was “UN Conference on Environment and Development”, and not “sustainable development”.

Where to go from here?

Victory comes at a cost, and the price paid for the media’s full embrace of the planetary boundaries language and framing is, possibly, a departure from the more thoughtful scientific coverage of such material in the past. This is no-one’s fault, but rather an outcome of the increasing polarization of politics and the way short video has undermined our attention span.

If every major global media creates a planetary beat, and fills it with reporters who thrive on covering complex issues, and the beat is empowered to be at the same level as the political beat, that would be something to celebrate.

But I do worry that we will run out of words to convey increasing urgency and alarm.

I’d love to hear from anyone who read the coverage of the boundaries update, and what you thought. Or if you didn’t even notice it, and think it’s irrelevant.

Please hit reply with your thoughts, and feedback.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!

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Lunch on the lake, Jorhat, Assam. Photo by Rohan Reddy on Unsplash

2023 will be remembered as the summer where we lurched from global warming to “global boiling”. July 2023 is officially the hottest month on record, and yet climate ambition continues to shrink everywhere.

Retreating climate ambition also coincides with a new political trend in Europe - far right wing parties turbo-charging their electoral strategy with an aggressive environmental policy that opposes “green” and favours “agricultural” interests.

Meanwhile, summer played out once again with distressing scenes of people facing wildfires, biblical heat and floods, imbuing with a poignant hopelessness the words of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley at a development finance summit in Paris in June:

The world cannot continue in the shadow of an old imperial order that does not see countries, that does not feel countries, that does not hear countries and worse does not see, feel or hear people.

For those of us coping with extreme heat that was not life threatening but still pretty intense, the question of how to adapt is a big one. Summer in Europe is getting pretty uncomfortable for tourists (and residents - this year the hardest hit were Greece, Spain and Italy), and the old continent seems slow and at times unwilling or unable to adapt. Every time a heatwave strikes, people act like it’s a temporary blip. People are reminded to hydrate regularly (but the public toilets are frankly a disincentive).

I was in Taiwan and Japan this summer, and noticed that the lived experience of 37C heat and 90% humidity was, compared to the equivalent in Paris, more bearable. Of course, it helps to sleep in an air-conditioned room, but beyond that, the business of going around during the daytime is a lot less gruelling thanks to a few small things, I’ll call them micro-adaptation.

1. hydration - Taipei is a paradise when it comes to tall iced drinks made from delicious ingredients from tea to tropical fruits to fresh sugar cane. The sugar cane juice in particular is a powerful thirst slayer. And in Japan no matter where you are there is always a vending machine selling water, cold coffee and tea, fruit juices, probiotic drinks (I find these very calming in extreme heat) & unusual combos such as salt & lychee.

2. cooling gadgets - from portable USB fans, to cooling wipes and liquids, to cooling neck bands and portable ice carriers - there is an ever expanding range of small, affordable devices to take the edge off the heat, and keep you feeling a tad more comfortable. The portable fan is my favourite.

3. sun avoidance culture - if you’ve had skin cancer, its very gratifying to be in a culture where people go all out to protect their skin during the summer. UV parasols are ubiquitous, and many are wearing UV sleeves to protect their arms and hands.

4. Mango shaved ice, Taipei. No comment needed.

   

Highlights from Sustainability

2023 will be remembered as a year of retreating climate ambition.

The dominant approach of global climate summitry can be summed up in a line. “Don’t mention Fossil Fuels” is now the way to get an agreement at the end of an international climate meeting. Christiana Figueres, who presided over the historic Paris Agreement in 2015 as head of the UNFCCC, wrote a mea culpa op-ed earlier this summer entitled: I thought fossil fuel firms could change. I was wrong.

👉 G20 and climate: No mention of phasing out fossil fuels

G20 climate ministers met in Chennai end-July, and pushed out a bland communique that failed to address proposals to phase down fossil fuels and tripe clean energy.

👉 COP28: Don’t talk about fossil fuels
Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, President of the COP28 in the UAE (and CEO of Abu Dhabi’s National Oil Company), sent a letter to governments outlining the main themes of the meeing: technology and innovation, inclusion, front-line communities and finance. “Unity is a prerequisite for success” he warned, which translates, basically, as “Don’t mention fossil fuels.”

👉 COP26: UK backtracks

The host country of COP26 has checked out as a green leader: PM Sunak is embracing full-on drilling for oil and gas as the way forward for energy security.

👉 Amazon Summit falls short

Earlier this month, Brazil’s President Lula and Colombia’s Petro hosted the Amazon Summit which failed to get a commitment from Amazon leaders to end deforestation by 2030 as countries couldn’t agree a common stance on the role of extractive industries such as beef, oil and mining, which are the primary drivers of its destruction. See Carbon Brief’s analysis of what the outcomes mean for climate and deforestation.

Europe’s far right politicizes the environment

In France, the far-right party, Rassemblement National, of Marine Le Pen, has just released their environmental policy. Le Monde writes that the party’s strategy is to treat climate and adaptation policies as a fertile source of national division to be exploited successfully just like immigration.

The new policy, which replaces the term “localism” with “common sense ecology” , seeks to frame an approach that relies exclusively on techno-solutions to deal with mitigation and embraces a brook-no-changes-to-status-quo approach that opposes “punitive” ecology.

This approach has already been tried and tested in the Netherlands by the BBB populist and agrarian party which is leading in the polls ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections in November. A similar movement, Vox, exists in Spain.

This topic came up in a 2021 episode of the New Climate Capitalism podcast, in an interview with academic Edouard Morena, who explained the dangers of allowing the far-right in France to appropriate the environment agenda.

This extract of the transcript has been edited for concision and clarity. To catch up with the entire episode which talks about the climate elite and Just Transitions, tune in here.

Denise: You were the one that actually alerted me recently to the fact that the far right in Europe is getting quite sophisticated in their climate narratives.

Edouard: In the case of Europe you have different situations. In places like Germany, the far-right parties like the AFD, for instance, are still fundamentally climate sceptic.

They’re still kind of very anti-climate, but if you look at countries like France, the Rassemblement Nationale, the dominant far-right party… in the last European elections it was really interesting to see how they took up the issue of climate change or the environment more generally head on. They were clearly kind of positioning themselves in that space, and they were clearly saying that, yes, it’s an important issue we need to address. 

And they were also suggesting some things like re-localization again, a kind of a concept which they also reappropriated from other groups and environmental groups who are probably not xenophobic or not racist, but they were taking up these same concepts and in many ways, making the same proposals, but coupling those concepts with this kind of idea that re-localization is also about protecting our culture, protecting our identity and fending off the invaders from North Africa, et cetera.

My big worry and my big question is, well, when they do come to power, if they do come to power - I hope not. But if they do come to power, what will be the position of climate elites or people involved in the international climate space?

(…)

I think that’s a big problem with these groups that I’m studying is that they are constantly depoliticizing the climate issue.

They are kind of presenting it as something that is not political as if there is kind of one straightforward answer; as if the kind of low carbon transition is just a series of steps that we need to take in order to reach our common goal or a common destiny, which is not the case.

(…)

I think the strength of the climate movement, the strength of the climate community in the broader sense is in its diversity and its capacity to disagree. It’s an in its capacity to engage in political conflict in order to move forward.

I think depoliticizing the issue is a danger and I’m slightly concerned by the fact that they present the climate issue as a nonpolitical, non-partisan issue when it fundamentally is, I’m convinced it is. I think it needs to be in order for us to really be able to address it.

Recommendations

A few Substack newsletters I enjoyed reading over the summer.

Concrete Avalanche is a newsletter about indy music from China, and a great way to chill out from life in general.

A Broad and Ample Road Some of the best newsletters don’t fall into any clear category. This one is written by two academics, a husband and wife couple, based in Taiwan, and is nominally “about” history, politics, justice, and law but really is a great curation of human-centric stuff. Here’s a recent book review of “Papers”, which is about asylum-seekers in France.

Slow Chinese is a newsletter for Chinese language learners, but it’s actually a great way to follow what’s hot on the Chinese internet. Andrew Methven picks a hot topic every week - such as the recent mega-floods in China - and breaks down the key words and phrases. One thing I love is the way it chronicles the crazy pace of changing slang and language on the Chinese internet.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading, if you haven’t already don’t forget to subscribe for regular updates from the sustainability space. And please hit reply with any comments, and feedback, we always love to hear from you.

Place de la Bourse, Paris. Photo by VizAforMemories ... on Unsplash

Like many other cities in Europe, Paris has been sunny and hot this past month, with July-like temperatures and the odd burst of heavy, tropical-style rain. France’s President Macron is this week hosting a big summit with a big ask - rebooting the international financial system to unlock the trillions to finance the energy transition and climate adaptation in the developing world.

Macron has hosted a couple of climate-y summits in the past; he is good at convening leaders, but the events tend to be forgettable on substance. Does anyone remember One Planet Summit 2017? Or One Planet Summit 2021 on biodiversity?

Titled Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, the two-day event gathers world leaders, among them Brazil’s President Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, China’s Premier Li Qiang, alongside bankers, think-tankers, representatives of international organisations and a few youth climate activists.

The stakes are big - failure of the North-South dialogue on how to “unlock the trillions” is at the heart of the impasse that has dogged international climate negotiations for many years, and any step forward will be a big political win.

At the heart of discussions is the Bridgetown Initiative which is championed by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and her country’s climate envoy, economist Avinash Persaud. (fascinating portrait of Persaud in Foreign Policy which quotes him saying earlier this year:)

These developed country kids are gluing themselves to the road on climate change. They’re not gluing themselves to the road on water scarcity, on development, on gender violence.”

The Bridgetown plan is somewhat technical, but it sits in a high context space that combines climate change, international finance, development and geopolitics.

In essence, Bridgetown seeks to unlock lending at scale to developing countries for the energy transition via a mechanism involving the IMF that will guarantee below-market interest rates.

To get the backstory, don’t miss our podcast interview with Sony Kapoor last year analysing the details of this plan, and whether or not it’s fit-for-purpose.

The top takeaways from that interview are below: all of them are still highly relevant.

• disagreement between the North and the South on how to finance the latter’s exit from fossil fuels is a useful lens on a wider problem about the geo-economics of today’s world of multiple, intersecting crises.

• one big flaw of the current approach is that it focuses on big numbers (“unlocking the trillions”) rather than the the quality of the finance

• absent from the debate is the question of which economic model the new engines of global growth - eg India and Indonesia - can follow without the carbon budget to replicate China’s carbon-intensive trajectory.

Nevertheless, hopes are high that this summit will pave the way for substantive progress at the upcoming milestones such as the G20 in India, the COP28 in Dubai, the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank and next year’s G20 in Brazil.

A blog post from French think tank IDDRI this month sums up the challenge ahead:

to rebuild confidence in the international system, and to determine fair rules that are more favorable to developing countries, in order to meet the challenges of development, the fight against climate change and the protection of biodiversity.

The author hints at possible outcomes, all of which are incremental

• the announcement of a framework for the suspension of debt repayments for countries hit by natural disasters (or even pandemics)

• a review of how developed countries might redirect their allocation of IMF Special Drawing Rights

• new ways of redirecting SDRs

• announcement of new partnerships for a just energy transition.

On the role of China in development finance, its worth pointing out that there are multiple, conflicting narratives out there right now. One says that China has turned off the lending tap, the French summit organizers stress that China is a leader in the area of South-South finance flows. But a more nuanced description has recently emerged of the Chinese approach to development finance: “small or beautiful”.

To go deeper, check out the recent China Global South podcast interview with lawyer Edwin Li on this topic.

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Highlights from Sustainability

📜📜📜 New acronyms from the EU, and why they matter:

If you were glazing over on the latest round of new (vowel-free) sustainability acroynyms, here’s a handy cheatsheet that explains all the latest ones, and why they matter, and for whom.

The latest one, just voted in by the European Parliament in early June is the (CSDDD) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive which will require companies to take responsibility for their environmental and social impacts as well as those of their suppliers. One sticking point in the negotiations has been the extent to which financial institutions would be covered in the scope.

Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)

European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS)

Green Claims Directive

Prohibiting Products Made with Forced Labor on the Union Market Regulation (PPMFLR)

🌲🌲🌲 Biodiversity credits

A Swedish bank bought European biodiversity credits last month, the first time such products have been created and sold in Europe.

Biodiversity credits are very different from the better-known offsets.

Biodiversity offsets compensate for negative impacts of human activities on plants, animals, and their environments but do not fix what has been destroyed. For example, planting new trees elsewhere does not restore environmental degradation resulting from mining.

Biodiversity credits are more proactive because investments are made in projects that help nature recover and promote its overall health. Biodiversity credits emphasize the importance of preserving nature for the benefit of all living things and future generations.

In this deal, Swedbank acquired the credits from a Scandinavian cooperative in central Sweden, using a methodology developed by experts from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). The credits go way beyond the promise of offsets, and represent conservation of high natural value areas, restoration of biodiversity and improved forest management techniques. Learn more about the methodology here.

COP28 preview - What happened in Bonn?

Every year, in June, the climate change negotiations convene in Bonn for a technical meeting which is a preparatory meeting for the bigger COP meeting, scheduled to take place in Dubai this November.

What you need to know:

• The United Arab Emirates COP president-designate Sultan Al Jaber is also chief executive of the country’s national oil company ADNOC. Last month, more than 130 European and US lawmakers published an open letter calling for Al Jaber to be removed from the role.

• Al Jaber attended the Bonn meeting briefly, and acknowledged for the first time that a fossil fuel phasedown was “inevitable”, but offered no timeline.

• On finance, the key issues of loss and damage finance, and the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) were addressed in dialogues. Both topics are highly contested and political in nature & the latter will come up at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris later this week as parties need political guidance from outside the technical track within the climate negotiations to make progress.

🛢️🛢️🛢️History of net zero, and where are we at?

Climate scientist Glen Peters’ shared a great set of slides reminding us of where net zero came from, what it means, and an update on progress. It’s been 8 years since the Paris Agreement was adopted, and in that time a lot has happened. The key slide is below, and the controversy around the COP28 president amply demonstrates that we’re still not done on this basic point.

As ever, thanks for reading and for your support. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please share with a friend or a colleague.

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I’ll be taking a break in July, and back in your inbox in August, much refreshed and hopefully with the heatwaves behind us. Please hit reply if you have any comments and feedback, it’s always a pleasure to hear from subscribers.

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