I was one of many surprised when Qatar was chosen to host this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP). Qatar is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas producer and home to the world’s third largest natural gas reserves. The country’s pro tennis tournament is the Qatar ExxonMobil Open. An OPEC member chairing a United Nations climate change conference? Simply put, carbon has made modern Qatar what it is today. Sixty percent of the nation’s GDP comes from oil and natural gas. Due to high prices and increased output, the country is booming. While some were disillusioned with the selection, Qatar is actually the perfect place to host a COP. Ignoring fossil fuel production and consumption isn’t going to achieve much and OPEC nations have a role to play. Bill…
Doha, Qatar: "mosquitos" (willing participants at UNFCCC) are flying and "breeding grounds" (Red Cross Climate Change Centre team members and myself) are waiting for "mosquitos" to return to lay an egg [card]. Once the "mosquitos" return to the "breeding ground" with an egg [card] they then seek out more humans to bite in order to lay another egg [card].
On the other front "medics" (other team members) are waiting to give out cure/clear out [cards] to humans bitten by "mosquitos." Once those previously bitten have a cured/clear out [card] they then seek out the "breeding grounds" to clear out the egg [cards]. The battle rages on!
Our activity seeks to create conversations and human interactions via game play. Follow @helloAntidote to see how…
As part of our project with Latvian NGO homo ecos:, Kathryn Wright, Bunyod Holmatov, and I are keeping an eye on topics here at COP18 that are important to Latvia. Aviation and maritime transport (shipping) are vital to the Latvian economy, which relies heavily on the sector to maintain connections to other nations in the EU and around the world. The UNFCCC has expressed interest in taking action to limit emissions from this sector, as it is both carbon-intensive and global in nature. Parties agree that regulation of aviation and shipping should occur through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and International Maritime Organization (IMO), but disagree over what “signal” the UNFCCC should send to the ICAO and IMO…
Though my personal Twitter account languishes from disuse, this semester I have started tweeting actively under the FES handle. In Doha, I've gotten to put this skill to serious work. Through the International Organizations and Conferences class, David Emmerman, Bunyod Holmatov and I partnered with homo ecos, a Latvian NGO whose primary focus is generating environmental awareness and social movements in Latvia. Our role was to help in climate policy research and capacity building for the larger Latvian NGO community. To do this, we produced a policy paper about key issues for Latvia at COP18 (Short primer: http://homoecos.lv/uploads/files/COP18_Short_Primer(1).pdf). The paper was intended for NGOs and ministries and distributed to the Latvian delegation. We also agreed to facilitate a social media campaign for…
Before I started my graduate studies in August, I was campaigning incessantly with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to drive the Rio+20 Earth Summit process towards real actions and accountability. I am carrying on the same mission to the UN Climate Conference in Doha with fellow students from Yale, but with a new tool at hand – a smartphone and web app called DecisionMakr - to crowdsource accountability.
Why am I obsessed with accountability?
We have had exactly 20 years of negotiations since the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, out of which the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was officially born. We have had a plethora of summits, conferences, intersesssionals, “informal informals”, and have spent billions of…
The COP18 UN climate negotiations have kicked off without too much fanfare. Host country Qatar is hosting its largest ever conference, with an expected 17,000 participants, including 1,500 media (although I heard only about half of these anticipated media actually got accredited). So far, expectations are quite muted for the conference, with Doha meant to be mainly an "implementation" Conference of Parties (COP) meeting that will not end in the high drama and pressure of its predecessors, Durban, Cancun, and Copenhagen.
Hey Everyone! Hope your Thanksgivings (for U.S. students) were most excellent—filled with good food and good company!
I’m back with the latest from FES, continuing with more Featured Alumni. This time, I’ve got Dan Berkman, MEM ’12, taking some time to talk about his experience at FES, and the work he is now doing on disaster preparedness in Washington, DC (a very, very popular destination for FES alumni).
Dan Berkman was one of my good friends at FES, and he very quickly acquired the name Disaster Dan around campus. Contrary to what you might think, Disaster Dan was so named because of his ability to FIX disasters, not to cause them (usually). While he was at FES, he exemplified the kind of entrepreneurial attitude that does so well at the school, and took…
This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post and The Metric, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy's blog.
Expectations for the global climate negotiations taking place over the next two weeks in Doha, Qatar, are dismally low, and major political transitions in China and the United States – the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases – further temper hope for any kind of game-changing proposal. So what are the more than 7,000 civil society members and 1,500 journalists(myself included) in attendance going to do to make their opinions count and to hold their governments accountable for accomplishing something in Doha?
Well, there’s an app for that, and it’s called DecisionMakr.
Having attended many of these negotiations in the past, I question the value of emitting carbon…
Doha is turning into a huge construction site. The COP 18 convention center itself is surrounded by several ongoing construction projects. The high standing cranes seem to signal the country's ambition in not only expanding its infrastructure but also engaging more in international affairs. The modern, fancy and huge convention center has clearly achieved such ends. It took me more than half an hour to simply walk through the building. I like the giant spider sculpture in the center, the many laptops for the participants to use, the food courts named "Grab n Go" and the wifi server named "Plug n Play". But when I was about to go the opening ceremony, the volunteer told me the room was full. Last year in Durban, big TV stations lively broadcasted the…
Kivalina clings to the tip of a wisp of a barrier island jutting into the Chukchi Sea. Home to less than 400 people, Kivalina, Alaska, is a windswept collection of buildings: a school, a store, homes. The Inupiat ancestors of Kivalina’s residents have persisted through harsh environmental conditions at or near the village’s current location – 80 miles from the Arctic Circle – for thousands of years. But new environmental challenges may force the residents to leave.
In October, a group of FESers traveled to Kivalina to gain a better understanding of this community’s experience at the frontline of climate change. They learned from a 77-year-old village elder and whale boat captain that whale hunting – a practice which has coloured Inupiat folklore, and provided sustenance and…
