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Attending her third UN Climate Change Conference left Gabriela Nagle Alverio, JD '25 PhD ’26, more committed than ever to expanding legal protections for those affected by climate change.

Nagle Alverio co-led Duke's student delegation to COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, as one of two teaching assistants for Duke’s UN Climate Change Negotiations Practicum, a course that explores international climate change negotiations and climate policy under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Read the students' conference blog and view the photo essay at Duke Today.)

Nagle Alverio shares more in the interview below.

After years of groundwork and two weeks of negotiations, some felt the final agreement of $300 billion in climate finance to developing countries fell short. What was your reaction?

This is not the first year that COP has been billed as a disappointment or a disaster, but if we aren’t happy with the current system the question we have to ask ourselves is, what should we do instead? I think we should be having that conversation and imagining an alternative to the current system. But the benefit to this model is that it’s the only forum where every single country has an equal voice – obviously, an equal voice that plays out differently based on power dynamics, but the fact that everyone, from the low-lying nation of Kiribati to the U.S., has an equal vote is what even got us to $300 billion. Otherwise, climate finance wouldn't have even been the focus of this COP and the final outcome would have been even lower.

And one thing to remember is that there's the negotiations and then there's the conference. On the conference side, you're meeting people from all over the world who are incredibly passionate about climate change in their local communities and are taking climate action. And when you juxtapose that with the negotiations, the space where climate action is supposed to be happening, it makes me feel like what we should actually be hearing about and reporting on are the ideas being shared from local climate advocates around the world. That’s where I get hope.

Were there any areas where you felt some kind of measurable forward movement?

I think even in the finance agreement, the initial proposal was for $250 billion and developing nations ultimately got it to come up to $300 billion. The rest of the $1.3 trillion is supposed to come from the private sector and multilaterals. So there's still a potential for a much more positive outcome if the private sector is actually mobilized. The very valid critique is, well, what if it's not? It's very empty. But even the fact that it's up $50 billion more, you could frame that in a positive way.

Aside from adaptation finance, operational frameworks were negotiated for carbon markets which could help make international carbon offsets more viable and trustworthy. And progress was made on the Global Goal on Adaptation, with negotiators working to define indicators for adaptation and recognizing that health is a central focus of adaptation efforts worldwide.

Were the negotiations contentious? Did you witness protests?

In the UN ‘blue zone,’ which during the negotiations becomes official UN territory, protests are not illegal, but in Azerbaijan they are. And the presidency has power over how many people get a permit even within the UN land. So there were very specific designated areas for protests.

That’s in contrast with Glasgow a few years ago, where during some protests half of all COP attendees were marching through the buildings. And in the city, they shut down the schools so that kids could come out into the streets and protest for climate action. But that is because the culture there is one of protest and free speech, whereas here (Azerbaijan) it’s illegal. And so you saw less of it in terms of numbers because it's just not allowed, but there were definitely protests occurring just as they did every year. But really, it’s not as important that protests occur at COP as it is that they occur throughout the rest of the year in each country so that policymakers know that their citizens are demanding increased ambition.

How did you become interested in environmental issues and climate migration?

I was always interested in international policy. In my senior year [at Stanford University] I took Introduction to Earth Systems, and it was environmental science, but it also had the human aspect. We studied climate policy and it just hit me in that class when I learned about the impacts of climate change on people, and how unfair it is that the people who have contributed to it the least are the ones who are already suffering the worst impacts and those impacts are only going to continue worsening. I hadn’t really understood what it meant to experience an existential crisis until that class. In that moment I knew this is what I must dedicate my life to.

To me, climate migration is the most human impact of climate change. You no longer have a home; you can't stay in the place where you've built your community and formed your memories. And not only is that traumatic, but then there’s the journey to get to somewhere new, and then being in a new place, and sometimes immigrants aren't treated with respect. What we need are solutions that protect people's rights. It was through searching for how I could pivot my research to focus on these solutions, and finding myself reading law review articles and looking at climate litigation databases, that I ultimately decided to apply to law school. I couldn’t be more grateful to be at Duke Law, where I have the opportunity to explore how all different aspects of the law, from immigration, to administrative, to corporate, to international, to tax law all provide avenues for climate solutions.