Threshold Conversations: Lina Yassin

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AMY: Thirty-four years ago, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, leaders of more than a hundred countries came together to try to do something remarkable: build a new international structure for cooperating on problems that transcend all borders, and affect all life on the planet. Water, pollution, and the growing awareness that the use of fossil fuels was messing up the climate. That 1992 gathering was called the Earth Summit, and one of the most important things to come out of it was the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U–N–F triple C. The countries that signed on to that project are called “parties to the convention,” and the annual conferences where they meet are called COPs: conferences of the parties.

But the Trump administration is making it clear that for them, this party is over. They’ve withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, and this past November, for the first time ever, the United States didn’t send anyone to the COP negotiations. Then, as we were putting this episode together, the administration announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the U–N–F triple C entirely. Together, these moves are a massive challenge to the entire premise of international cooperation on climate.

In the midst of all this upheaval, I wanted to talk to someone with deep knowledge about the UN process, and that led me to my guest today, Lina Yassin. She’s been to nine of these global climate conferences, including the most recent one, in Brazil. Originally from Sudan, Lina is a climate policy researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, a think tank based in the UK. At COP conferences, she provides technical support for some of the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations, including her own. I wanted to talk with Lina about what happened at this year’s conference, and why she believes it’s essential to keep this multilateral process alive. We talked in mid-December 2025, shortly after the Brazil climate conference ended.

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AMY: Lina Yassin, welcome to Threshold Conversations.

LINA: Thank you for having me, Amy.

AMY: So, personal question: were you alive when the first Earth Summit was held?

LINA: No, I was not. I was not. I was born a few years after.

AMY: Okay, just just to put in perspective how long the world has been working on this. So as a kid growing up in Sudan, when did you become aware that there was this thing called the COP conferences, or for that matter, climate change?

LINA: Growing up in Sudan, my identity is shaped by the environment around me. The Nile River, the longest running river in the world, actually forms in Khartoum, in my city at the capital of Sudan. And we're all proud of the Nile being the source of life. It feeds our agriculture, right fields, our economy, and it's a huge part of our identity.

I want to say my first interaction with climate change was in 2013. Because at the time, Sudan was facing one of the biggest floods, in its history. We had floods every year. But that year was specifically interesting to me because I saw it impacting people around me. Family members had to to vacate homes. I volunteered in a youth initiative to help the victims relocate to safer spaces.

And just hearing how life has been shattered in a matter of hours. People losing income, livelihoods, kids, not being able to go to school because the school no longer exists. And that's when I started thinking and wondering, why is this happening? Surely there's a bigger picture here. And I was very surprised to learn about climate change. I've never heard of it in school.

And that kind of became my mission. I wanted to not just learn more, but I wanted others around me to also know that this is happening. And this is something that we need to not just be aware of, but we also need to respond to it. At the time, I was preparing to go to study university, finishing my high school exams, and I was adamant on becoming an engineer.

But then I also started writing on climate change publishing and newspapers and becoming a climate journalist myself or a climate communicator is what I used to call myself at the time, because I really wanted to spread awareness, send a message. So when I was in my second year of university, I went to attend my first COP ever, which was COP 22, in Morocco, in Marrakesh.

And that was the moment when I realized I need to change careers.

AMY: Wow. That's fascinating. So focusing in on this latest COP, I know, having been to the COP in Glasgow, this is sort of a brutal question I'm about to ask you, and I'm laughing at myself for asking it. What are the main takeaways from this latest COP?

LINA: It’s not the easiest question to answer for sure. It's a two weeks long conference. For me, it's three weeks because, as government officials and advisers, we travel a week before everyone to prepare and have preparatory meetings. But it's a conference that discusses many agenda items. We're talking about almost 100 rooms working in parallel, producing a text. So there's no way I could summarize to you all the outcomes in a minute or two.

But what I can say is this is supposed to be the adaptation COP Brazil, the presidency of the COP, and the host of the COP said, every time we talk about COP, we talk about mitigation, we talk about reducing emissions. But even if we cut emissions tomorrow to zero, we're still going to have to adapt. Floods are still going to hit Sudan.

Hurricanes are still going to happen. Adaptation is any act that a country takes to adapt to the climate change impact. It can be as simple as having early warning systems so that the next time Sudan is being hit by floods, we know where exactly the floods were hit and when, and families and lives can be saved. It could also be by investing in agriculture technology that allows farmers to predict rain patterns and maybe change their crops, and be able to save their harvest.

So it's things that allow us to survive the climate change impact. Brazil wanted to spotlight adaptation, and that came in a few ways. One of the key outcomes that we wanted is finance for adaptation. Right now, adaptation finance is seen as risky because adaptation is fundamentally a public debt. So you can't have private sectors investing in it.

It has to come from public funding and it has to be in form of grants. So coming into COP, the least developed countries, the LDC, who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, and the group that I work with have demanded that to have a successful COP, we need to triple adaptation finance. So whatever is being paid to adaptation right now, we need to triple it by 2030. And the number specifically was supposed to be 120 billion by 2030. 

We did get that. But unfortunately, we got it by 2035. So the world has agreed to triple adaptation finance, but by 2035. And we need to keep in mind that this five year delay might sound like a minor delay, but it is five years of floods and hurricanes hitting and destroying lives and livelihoods with no funding coming into support. So we're essentially sentencing some people to a devastating future. By that delay. Developed countries argued that one of the biggest supporters, donors and emitters, which is the US, is leaving the Paris Agreement and would not be paying to this goal, and therefore this big gap cannot be closed. And the only way to close it is to extend the timeline by five more years. I would say that's the biggest outcome to me for this COP.

AMY: And we talk about “donor countries” in this context, it’s important to keep in mind that we’re not talking about charity. This isn’t some countries asking others for a handout to help them with adaptation to the climate crisis. The whole concept of these international negotiations is that some countries have contributed the most to  the problem, and therefore have the greatest responsibility to fix it, right?

LINA: It's easier for me to speak as someone who comes from Sudan, where we contributed nothing, really, fractions of percentages to the historical emissions and even LDC group that least developed countries as a whole, they represent 1 billion people. We contributed to less than 1% of emissions. So I'm of the view that we need to look at historical responsibility, and we need to look at those who really benefited, those who really built their wealth and their status. To me, that should be the compass and how we decide on climate justice.

AMY: And about the fact that the US is leaving the Paris Agreement. How much was that present at the conference? Was it just coming up all the time, or were people kind of already adjusted to that and just moving forward with that more in the sidelines?

LINA: The U.S. have not sent a delegation. There has been zero representatives from the US government in the negotiations, and it's been the elephant in the room. It's been the elephant in the room, even last year in COP 29, when the news of the US elections came out during COP. So even though we had a U.S. delegation at the time, people understood that things are going to be different, very different.

It's been a reason why ambition itself had to be, limited, because we knew that, one of the biggest emitters, but also donors is not here to agree or disagree. So it meant that we were limited in what we could realistically get out of COP, but it also was the biggest challenge to the multilateral system. The Kyoto Protocol slowly failed because one party, the US as well, said we cannot to ratify this and we cannot be part of it.

And slowly countries left. So now we're finding ourself trying to keep Paris alive, but also trying to keep multilateralism alive. A lot of people are saying COPs are not delivering their waste of time, but it's also the only space where poor countries, developing countries, vulnerable communities have a say. If we don't have the COPs, we don't keep this machinery going, it will be absorbed by G7 or G20. I'm never going to have access to those spaces. My countries are never going to have access to those spaces. So for us right now, U.S. leaving is a very big challenge. But the objective is to keep this alive, keep this process going, and show that multilateralism can still deliver.

AMY: Did you sense anger? What was the mood about the fact of the US leaving among the people you were talking with.

LINA: What I sense is not anger, I sense concern, like I said, because people do not want this process to collapse. What I sensed is a different range of feelings. Some people are hopeful that if anything, when the system is being tested like it is right now, it comes out stronger if it survives. And this is what I like to think, because hope is the only thing that could keep you going when it's, when it's 2 a.m. and you're negotiating a text that, you know, might not go anywhere. 

AMY: When the Trump administration announced that they were leaving the Paris Agreement, one of the thoughts that I had, in addition to being very concerned and well, a lot of feelings, was: is there any way in which this is better than an administration who wants to sabotage the Paris Agreement, staying in it and potentially doing a whole lot to disrupt the process? Like, is it better to have them out of there completely versus in there making it worse? 

LINA: It's an interesting dilemma because I could see the logic behind that. And I do think maybe some rooms, some negotiation rooms have felt more productive, because of the fact that the US was removed from the discussion. But overall, I would say, given that climate change does not know borders, climate change is a is a global issue.

I am of the view that we all need to be collectively in the table, even if we don't like each other, even if we have our differences, we it has to be the table where we put those differences aside and think together through how we can all come out of this, and survive this crisis. I hope that the US leaving does not open the doors for others to say, actually, we'll also sort of pack in and leave.

AMY: So, zooming out to try to understand who would you say the key players were, or one way to think about it is if COP was a TV show, who would the main characters be, and what are the conflicts between them?

LINA: I think, if COP was a TV show, first of all, it would be a drama. And it would have too many seasons and be one of those shows that runs on forever. But there would be a couple of interesting characters, and I'm definitely going to be biased in my answer to, but we've got the least developed countries and the small island states.

I think those would be the moral center of the show. Those are the characters that, they don't have the biggest budget. They don't have the fanciest customs or anything, but they speak with a lot of moral clarity. So they will always be the ones with the clearest script and the ones saying it the way it is. And I would like to say that would be the favorites.

But also then we would have the US. The US would be the character who, is on and off again, comes in one season, leaves one season. And probably stands out dramatically at some point. Like if we had kicked off this season, it would be the US storming out. But then I think it's also the character that the whole season will be shaped based on whether or not they're in or out.

And then you have developed countries beyond the US. You have, the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, these are countries that are now going through a very hard time because they want to continue delivering. They know they are still the ones responsible for their historical emissions, but they also are being challenged by the fact that their friend has left and is no longer being held accountable.

And some of that burden will be shifted on to them. They see a role for others like China, India, Brazil, more emerging economies to step up and be part of the leading group. But that is also very challenging, legally, because the way the COP function is based on who we agreed in 1992, was developed and developing country.

That categorization was based on who was a member of the OECD and that year. So, believe it or not, China, India, Gulf countries like Saudi, like the UAE are all developing countries, and legally they are actually qualified to receive funding and support. They don't probably need it, most of them, but they are qualified to do so.

And there's no responsibility on them to pay. They do contribute. They do pay, but voluntarily, and they want to maintain that voluntarily nature of their contributions. So yeah, you have those, developed countries that are now being challenged and emerging economies being the ones in the middle. They want to develop, they want to keep producing oil, but they also want to protect their status as developing countries that need support.

And then we would have other things. We would have characters that we won't see working in the background, which are the oil lobbyists, an increasing number of oil lobbyists come in to COPs trying to stall progress and trying to create obstacles. And they are a key character, but a character that we almost don't see because they blend in so well with the rest of us. Complicated show, sorry. 

AMY: Yeah, well, it is a complicated show. It was a great answer. And like you said it’s just this drama that just goes on and on…and knowing that we're 30 years in and carbon emissions are still going up, I think a lot of people watching from the outside might be like, what is the point here? Why do we keep doing this? Is this process working at all? How do you think about that?

LINA: If anyone sees the data and thinks that way, I think that's a fair conclusion. You could argue that since 1992 and since we established the COPs and the energy policy, emissions have not gone down except briefly for Covid, but it doesn't fully tell the story to me. The story here is that let's think about how life would have been without this process.

This process may have not managed to reduce emissions, but it has slowed it down significantly. In Paris, we agreed we're going to reduce global warming to two degrees. We're going to aim for a 1.5 degree. Without this process, we would have been heading towards six degrees. We are not on track to achieve in the Paris Agreement objective of two and 1.5.

We are way over that still, but at least we've designed the system that holds the world accountable. It may not be delivering, but hopefully with the right change of administrations and policies and politics in some countries, we could get to the two degree target. Or we could keep the one point degree target alive. So my argument would be fair enough. We are still producing, we're still in mitten, but things would have been far worse potentially, if we all come together, truly, we could still survive this crisis.

AMY: We’ll have more of my conversation with Lina Yassin right after this. 

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AMY: So, in Season 4 of Threshold, one of the topics that we spent a fair amount of time on was Loss and Damage. It was really a big topic at the Glasgow COP that I went to. Can you just, in a broad strokes way, define loss and damage for people who don't know, and also fill us in on what happened regarding loss and damage at this COP?

LINA: So the way I like to think of loss and damage is, to think of the three pillars. Mitigation, which is stopping emissions adaptation, which is adapting to, the impacts of climate change like floods, hurricanes, etc., and then trying to still make a living and survive. And then you have loss and damage. So when a flood hits, if I have early warning systems and I'm able to know when and where it will hit, I could help reduce the damage.

But there's still going to be damage. There's going to be lives lost. There's going to be houses destroyed, economies shattered, your islands sinking, their territory disappearing. You can't adapt to that. We've reached the point, unfortunately, where things are being damaged, to the point where we have to talk about reparations. That term is very contentious because legally that opens up a whole new world. But we've been trying to discuss how do we help those countries that have now reached the point beyond adaptation?

Studies show that for us to meet the needs of what countries have lost due to climate change, we're talking about anything between 300 to 600 billion by 2030. Right now, the fund for Responding to Loss and Damage have only received $719 million. That’s nothing, it’s a fraction. And what's happening at COP and this year is that we're still trying to figure out the ways in which grants can be disbursed to countries. We need to place a really strong emphasis on grants, because when you say you're giving countries money to support them with climate change, you can't be giving them loans.

Majority of developing countries, my country, Sudan, is heavily indebted. We constantly pay back loans in our depreciating local currency against the dollar. And if you give us a bit more loans to try and fix climate change or just lock in us in a debt cycle. So we also need to be careful about how some countries really need to be supported in purely grants or highly concessional loans, so that they don't end up locking themselves in even more, crisis along the way.

AMY: I have to ask one big thorny additional question, which is consensus. Every country has to agree upon the treaty for it to keep moving forward. Can you talk about the pros and cons of that that we're living with now?

LINA: So at the time when it was being agreed, the majority of countries wanted COP to function on a voting basis. So if the majority agree, everyone has to comply. This could not be agreed in. And in 1996, a few countries objected and said we had to stick with consensus. So right now, every decision at COP, every tax and that the COPs produce hundreds of text has to be agreed by consensus, meaning any country at any time can stop the whole thing.

And that's a very powerful thing you could argue is not the most efficient way to do things. And I would argue the same because there have been many moments at COP where majority of countries wanted to deliver very ambitious, outcomes that would have actually taken us forward a bit more, and it was blocked by a few minorities.

But then you could also argue that it's a very powerful tool, because that means everyone has a voice. Countries that normally don't have a voice. So to me, it's unfortunately the reality that we have to deal with and we need to talk about reform of COP. We need to talk about how the system can deliver faster and how the system can be more efficient, because right now, there are so many in parallel negotiations that someone like me, who's part of the Sudanese delegation, we were only 15 at COP.

We're going to be missing on half of the rooms. And that's the reality for a lot of small delegations and a lot of small countries where you end up not being in the table simply because you don't have enough people on the ground. So these are the type of reforms that we also need to talk about. How do we make this more fair?

AMY: I really appreciate your approach to all of this and the way that you've gone to nine COPs, and I can feel you're invested in like, this is the tool we have. We have to figure out the best way to use it. And I really felt that way when I was at COP too. Like, the blanket, ‘oh, this whole process is screwed. Let's just forget about it.’ It frustrates me because I'm like, well, what's your idea then? What's going to replace this? At the same time, if we just had a voting system, the majority of countries in the world would absolutely be voting for more ambition on so many fronts. And sometimes I don't know how to square those two realities in my mind. And I wonder, you know, how do you live with that contradiction of like, I'm not going to give up faith in this because I can't. And there were cynical, and I would say even corrupting influences that had a big impact from the beginning and still do.

LINA: Yeah, I grapple with the same question. And it gets really intense during COP when you can see that we're so close, so close to something that could make a difference. But then we have to go back and and think of some a bit more vague language that someone will be more comfortable with. So I definitely struggle a lot with that.

I'm also aware of the fact that we are fighting one of the strongest lobbies in the world. They they're strong in presence. They're strong in resources and funds and the strength in their ability to get to decision makers. And that's the reality that we're facing. The oil industry will keep on lobbying, and stalling the process as much as they can.

But I also believe in our ability to communicate reality, and get to the public. At the end of the day, decision makers have to listen to voters. If you can see that the public wants you to do something, at some point, you're going to have to listen to those people. So to me, as much as it is about negotiations and trying to get progress and trying to push and keeping the space alive because it has to remain, I really think it's essential to stop treating the COP as a bubble and actually create that bridge between the fact that we now have a weaker agreement and the public needing to know who blocked it, who stopped it, and that hopefully then translates into people voting differently. To me, those two are really linked. And we need to make sure that politicians understand that their survival in office depends on them agreeing on more ambitious climate outcomes. This is not an isolated process. This impacts all of us, and we all should know how it's impacting our future.

AMY: What keeps you personally in this fight?

LINA: Because I have, grown up in a country that is, severely impacted by climate change. Sudan is also predicted to be one of the countries that could become uninhabitable due to temperature rise. And, I mean, I grew up in a hot country. I can't imagine how hot it could be beyond that. To me, the fact that we know this is happening, we know that, in a few decades, some countries would not exist.

My country would not exist is the reason I have to keep fighting. I have to make sure this space ends up delivering what it promised to do. I wonder what history will say about this era in life where we knew climate change is happening. We knew that we could fix it, but we decided not to do anything. And I don't want that to be the story.

I want the story to be a story of where we actually eventually managed to do it. So to me, it's a responsibility. As soon as you become aware of climate change, when you decide to look the other way and not do anything, then you’re making a choice of giving future generations a future that isn’t inhabitable. And I don't want to do that.

AMY: So in addition to being impacted by climate change, Sudan is going through a brutal war. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the connection between those two things if there is one, the disruption and violence of war and climate change?

LINA: Sudan has been at war since April, 2023. It's, it's one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time, but also one of the most underreported, this 12 million, refugees caused by this crisis, including my own family who had to relocate to Egypt and to me, it's another reason why, the Sudanese delegation was this strong force at COP. Because we all knew that this is exactly the time where we need to keep pushing for ambitious climate outcomes, and we need to keep making sure money is being channeled to the most vulnerable countries, because right now, farmers who survive bullets will not survive the fact that their harvest is is failing. Refugees who survive are now in refugee camps, are being washed away by floods.

So those who survive the war are not surviving climate change. And that means we can't wait for peace to then come and say, oh, we need to help Sudan adapt to climate change. Now we need to do that while it's happening. And to me and to the Sudanese delegation, this has been the biggest motivation we've all came to Belém, to Brazil with a huge grief that I can't contain in words. But we kept working because we knew that we could save some lives. And I guess that's the biggest motivation.

AMY: It kind of brings me back to what you said about the countries that are the moral center of this drama. And you're so right. Showing the rest of us how it's done.

LINA: We’ve got nothing but moral clarity to bring to this process. And I hope at some point we are going to live, to survive, to see a day where that becomes the guiding tool.

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CREDITS

To learn more about Lina Yassin and her climate diplomacy work, you can visit her page at the International Institute for Environment and Development, at I-I-E-D dot org. We’ll put a link in the show notes. And I just want to flag again that Lina and I talked in December of 2025, a couple of weeks before the Trump administration announced their intention to withdraw the United States from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U-N-F-triple-C. I’ll be writing more about this on my Substack, Letters to Earthlings, in coming weeks. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Finally, if you want to hear more about what it’s like inside one of these climate conferences as it’s happening, check out Season 4 of Threshold, Time to 1.5. 

Threshold Conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening. If you’d like to support our show, give us a rating in your podcast app — of course, we’re hoping for all the stars. And consider signing up for a monthly donation at threshold podcast dot org. Even five or ten dollars a month makes a big difference for us. That’s threshold podcast dot org. Thanks!