(luckily, I called them last night and they said that they'd give me a rescheduled time. phew but the weekend was agony!!!)
On saturday evening, we were invited for dinner by the Kiribati delegation. It was very relaxed and interesting to learn about their islands and their lifestyle! Apparently their capital is the most densely populated city in the world. It takes them 2 weeks to travel from one end of their territory to the other. Their islands span over the date line, which causes many communication problems, for example if there is an emergency in one island on a Monday, the other islands won't receive the call, because it still is Sunday. Their main economy is the revenue of fishing licences given to (foreign) fisher boats, given the huge territory that spans between their islands. I mentioned the United World Colleges to the head of their delegation, in the hope that maybe we'll have a Kiribati student one day? She seemed quite interested.
After the dinner, there was an NGO party, which was good to finally leave some steam off.
I then spend the whole sunday sleeping and finishing off some work for UNfairplay.
Today, when we returned, there were some seeds of hope! The negotiators met on their (supposedly meeting-free) Sunday and Saturday and the first decision regarding Article 6 of the UNFCCC convention (it's about education and public awareness to climate change, quite a hot topic for the youth movement) got passed - including all the proposals the youth movement was pushing for! Success!
If you want some more updates about what is going on at the negotiations, I would refer you to ECO, an NGO newsletter that is published daily and is able to explain the negotiations much better than I can.
http://climatenetwork.org/eco-newsletters
Some key issues here are the establishment of one, fair climate fund, and even if it might not be legally binding this year (most expect the next COP to establish a legally binding agreement, and here to lay the foundations to it), there are some key issues to sort out: How much? To whom will the money go? Loans or grands? How do we ensure that governments don't just "relabel" money they would have given anyway and claim the credit for it? How can we make sure LDCs, women and indigenous communities are represented fairly? What role should the worldbank play? How can we make sure that 50% of the money will actually go to adaptation (so far 90% of the money that is located in many small funds goes to mitigation in only a handful of countries).
Another issue is how to save the forests. A new, very controversial program has been developed, REDD and REDD+. The scope of these programs is gigantic, and with so much money involved, governments are fighting hard for or against it. Basically, it is putting a price on the rainforest, allows nations that emit too much to offset their emissions by buying rainforest and makes it too expensive for countries to continue deforestation, instead they get paid for looking after the forest.
With a proper agreement on how to save the forests (the deforestation makes up around 20% of our CO2 emissions at the moment) and a proper, fair climate fund, we might actually be well underway! See ECO for more details! :)
Also, I got worldmapper to plot the number of delegates here in Cancun for me. Interesting, right? A huge thanks to Benjamin Henning from the University of Sheffield for his patience and willingness to help us!
I'll keep you posted!
I hope Oxford understand that you're too busy saving the planet to attend to minor matters like a university interview!
ReplyDeleteI like the map. Interesting how the northern fat cats (Canada, US, Russia, etc.)seem to be less interested than developing countries. I also liked the new comparative sizes of NZ and Aus!