Coachella is a festival that all of us who love music and festivals aspire to attend at least once in our lives. But going isn’t just a matter of having the means to travel—what matters most is managing to secure one of the highly coveted passes to this six-day event spread across two weekends.
Held each year in a California desert, this festival draws over 250,000 people from all over the world and is a must-attend event for the Hollywood jet-set, global elites, models, artists, singers, and a few lucky festivalgoers who manage to take part in one of the most “Instagrammable” events of the year.
It could be said that more than a music festival, Coachella is a platform to see and be seen—to generate social media content designed to get likes and engagement. But above all, Coachella has become a meeting point for a tribe of people with shared interests, quite different from those who inspired its name in the first place.
Forgive me, climate summit enthusiasts, but after following a week and a half of news from Dubai, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between these two events. While it is by no means my intention to trivialize the original purpose of the Conferences of the Parties (from which the acronym COP derives), I do hope to reflect on what these conferences have become.
“The Parties” refers to the countries that have ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has governed global climate negotiations since 1994. The COP summits are the main forums where these countries agree—through a complex process of negotiation and consensus—on the targets to address the climate crisis.
The first COP (COP1) took place in 1995 in Berlin, hosted by then-German Environment Minister Angela Merkel. The most emblematic to date has been COP21, where the landmark Paris Agreement was adopted—still the leading global climate policy framework.
Now, 28 years after Berlin, according to Reuters, the number of registered attendees at COP28 is 84,000. And I can’t help but ask: what is the carbon footprint of an event of this magnitude—an event whose very purpose is to find ways to reduce, mitigate, and combat climate change?
Huge national pavilions, themed expos, networking cocktails, side conferences, social media photo-ops, carefully curated outfits, private jets, and a political, climate, and environmental jet set. Social media flooded with pictures of attendees: politicians posing with celebrities, celebrities posing with activists.
Is this kind of staging—and the travel of what is essentially the population of a small town to a distant country—really necessary? Some argue that this display helps amplify the message. Even if we were to accept that reasoning, we could still do without at least 70,000 of those people.
The truth is, in an entertainment-driven society, where everything tends to become a spectacle, we must be careful not to distort what was originally well-intentioned. The COPs must not turn into an environmental Coachella. Let’s not lose sight of what really matters in conversations about climate change, the environment, and energy.
Carolina Rojas Gómez
Student, Executive Master of Management in Energy
BI Norwegian Business School
