COP31 Field Holding Invitation

In November, Collective Transitions’ co-founder, Luea, will travel to Antalya, Turkey to be with the Youth Negotiators Academy (YNA) at this year’s UNFCCC COP31. Luea has accompanied, trained and supported Youth Negotiators from over 90 countries since 2022 as part of the Youth Negotiators Team, helping to build their resources and skills leading up to the annual Convention of Parties. The multilateral event takes place this year between 9 - 20th November.

We hold a deep respect for, and dedication to the care and the power of the work the YNA upholds each year, in preparation for these UN negotiations, as well as during and after, as they help to shift and transcend deeply ingrained systemic patterns and dynamics, all within the great nuances and challenges the space throws up.

An intentional field of presence

With this deep respect and our long-term partnership in mind, we would like to share a wider field-holding experience with you during COP31. We invite all our fellow peer-practitioners to practice together, co-holding an intentional field of presence, coherence and grounding to help encourage steadiness throughout the YNA’s coming weeks.

Each year, the UNFCCC COP, held over two weeks, promises to be an intense, highly controversial and complex field; an extreme concentration of global macro-dynamics within a microcosm.

To navigate this with presence and rigour together we would like to create a field holding circle which:

Can witness what shows up and what wants to be acknowledged.
Recognises what calls to be worked in the depths.
Can receive and be available from a place beyond judgment.
Can help ground high charge and intensity, like a lightning rod.
Is both specific and unattached at the same time.

Would you like to join us with your own pactice and ways of holding space?

Inspired by the work of The Rainmaker; insights from Ilya Prigogine’s work who said: “…small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order”; and the work of many others including, and especially, our indigenous friends and teachers, we deeply trust the power of co-creating intentional fields to cultivate groundedness, coherence and presence so as to enable life-affirming processes and outcomes.

This specific invitation is dedicated, in the first place, to the more than 150+ Youth Negotiators from the YNA who will be there throughout the duration of COP, negotiating on behalf of their countries, their communities, and future generations; the team members of YNA; and to the most benevolent outcomes of COP31 for all forms of life.

We aim to create a field that energetically co-holds the different work and contributions and enables ripples to spark inspiration, clarity and trust-based decisions across the multilateral space. To do this, we imagine this intentional field coming to life by everyone connecting and contributing in their unique ways and times through their practices, prayers, rituals, and other forms of contemplative and intentional practice.

How we come together

Pre-COP orientation call:

We will be hosting an orientation call on October 23, 2026 at 18:00 (CET).

During this call we will explore what it means to hold a field together across distance, sharing stories from the past years, delving into what practices can be supportive and why, and how this work can generatively influence complex undertakings.

If you would like to join this call, please send an email to natalie[@]collectivetransitions.com.

We will then send you the log-in information and further details.

We look forward to seeing you there!

We know that co-holding a field with a gentle yet precise frequency can do much more than can ever be measured by Western tools. Field holding is, from our perspective, essential for the enabling and amplifying of transformative potential.

This is work to be done collectively

A background to Luea’s work

As part of the YNA team and steward circle, Luea’s contributions are especially focused during the six months of online and in-person training leading up to each COP. Within these sessions, Luea contributes with content around systemic awareness, community building, dialogue practices, mental health, and group well-being, conflict resolution, leadership, and more.

Whilst on the ground at each COP, Luea tends to the YNA community and team coherence, especially the emotional and mental well-being of YNA members, as well as initiating daily sense-making and peer-learning opportunities throughout the intense and gruelling marathon for all involved.

Cultivating a culture of care and friendship, nurturing and deepening relationships across differences and diversity, and enabling the conditions for islands of sanity and coherence to be co-created together, is the underlying thread that ties all of Luea’s work here together.

While the UN conventions and their negotiation processes concern us deeply, not least because of the perpetuating systemic dynamics, patterns and tendencies which enable and profit from deep fragmentation, each year Luea witnesses the younger generation readying themselves to co-shape a different culture - one that is infused with deep care for each other, as well as the natural, and more-than-human world: brilliant hearts and minds that dare to think and act ‘out of the box’, and who are not afraid to be with complexity, whilst also carrying an eagerness to help shift deeply ingrained patterns.

It therefore feels all the more prescient to call upon all our diverse and ancient technologies to co-hold an intentional and energetic field across geographies, which allows healing, re-alignment, and regeneration for all, whilst the more rational negotiations deals take place throughout these two weeks.

Reflections from COP28: Reflection on COP28. A microcosm of the world’s forces and illusions.

Reflections from COP30: A culture of care in pressurised negotiations