At Paris climate talks, top French envoy tries to avoid mistakes of past hosts

Le Bourget, France: As Laurence Tubiana, France’s top climate change envoy, prepared for her government to host the high-stakes summit meeting now unfolding just outside Paris, she thought at length about lighting design.

“The lighting must be soft, it must make people feel comfortable,” she said in an interview before the meeting. Sure enough, each workspace at the gathering — which is taking place in a complex of temporarily converted aeroplane hangars and tents — is illuminated by a gracefully curved table lamp, casting a gentle glow.

Tubiana also thought about food. Typically the fare at such conferences ranges from forgettable to demoralising. Tubiana wanted cuisine that would facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs. At the French climate conference, negotiators from the United States, China, Russia and India are dining together over duck confit, boeuf bourguignon and French wines.

Tubiana’s attention to such details comes on top of 18 months of near-constant world travel and hundreds of hours of official meetings, as she has sought to build behind-the-scenes support for what the French government hopes will be a historic new global accord to curb climate change.

Ultimately, the negotiations here, which are scheduled to conclude Friday, will succeed or fail on the substance of the agreement among 195 countries and the European Union. But it is widely acknowledged that the host government plays a crucial role in the outcome.

As France’s climate change ambassador to the United Nations, it is Tubiana’s charge to structure the process of the talks, and to act as a go-between, mediator and broker of deals. A successful deal could commit nearly every country on earth to enacting plans to cut its planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution, and could trigger a fundamental shift from fossil fuels to clean energy sources throughout the global economy.

Privately, Tubiana has told colleagues that she feels as if she is holding the weight of the entire negotiations on her shoulders.

She knows what failure looks like. The Paris talks are essentially a do-over of a much-hyped 2009 summit meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, where world leaders personally attempted to hammer out a similar treaty. But the meeting collapsed in acrimony as countries failed to reach a deal with any legal force.

While multiple factors contributed to the Copenhagen meltdown, many participants said part of the blame went to the Danish government. The Danish hosts have been excoriated as rigid, secretive and uncreative in running the talks. The hourlong security lines, bad convention centre food and mood of confrontational brinkmanship did not help facilitate deal-making. Indeed, at least two major academic papers have concluded that poor diplomacy by the Danes was a major contributor to the failure of the Copenhagen talks.

Tubiana says she wants to avoid what she calls a Copenhagen-style “psychodrama” in Paris. To do that, she has deployed every tool available to a French diplomat, including a nearly unparalleled global network of embassies and consulates, her long-standing personal friendships in government and academia and the lure of French food and wine.

In many ways, Tubiana, 64, is a classic Parisienne intellectual. A political scientist who has taught for years at the prestigious French university Sciences Po in Paris, and at Columbia University in New York, her academic background spans economics, environmental policy and international development. She has worked on government, financial and academic boards in places like India and China and at institutions like the World Bank.

Tubiana was appointed her government’s senior climate envoy in 2014 by the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, who is serving as the president of the conference, with the directive to do everything necessary to yield a successful outcome here. She sought to engage other countries on the talks early and often, and reached out to her international network of academics, many of whom are influential in shaping their governments’ positions in the talks.

And she deployed a powerful diplomatic tool: the legion of elegant French embassies around the world, an institution whose origins go back to the days when France was one of the most powerful forces in international relations. She had the embassies hold regular dinners and salons with key players in each country — lawmakers, but also business leaders, journalists and even opponents of climate policy.

Tubiana and her friend Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who stand out as the two most prominent women in the talks, have a shared joke about how to navigate the process of building consensus among nearly 200 governments.

“Climate change is about ecosystems,” Tubiana said. “Climate change negotiations are about ego-systems.”

Her diplomatic strategy appears to be working. “She’s quite extraordinary,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on international climate change negotiations with the World Resources Institute, a research organisation. “She’s a subject expert with long, deep relationships with people in the developed and developing world. The mix of deep, substantive knowledge combined with the machine of French diplomacy behind her has helped the process tremendously.”

She added, “French diplomacy is about nuance and cooperation, rather than blunt, direct confrontation.”