Nothing was more unsettling than my conversations with ambassadors whose countries were threatened with extinction as a result of climate change. I arrived at the UN at a time when the UN-sponsored process was stalemated and acrimonious. When countries convened in 2013, more than two years before the eventual Paris Agreement, the Philippines’s lead delegate went on a hunger strike to protest the lack of urgency among negotiators, and a bloc of 132 countries staged a walkout. Similar frustrations, as well as abject fear, dominated my meetings with representatives of the most vulnerable nations.
I remember this hunger strike and walkout
