For a week I have been trying to put my finger on the cause of the fog that I feel at COP18.
Durban felt better than Doha. There is a lingering feeling that something vital is missing, and I'm sorry to say that I am underwhelmed because of it. To be fair, last year was my first COP, and there's always something extra special about the initiation experience because the future experiences tend to have diminishing returns.
I'm not jaded, but definitely hoping for something more and not finding it. Perhaps it is because we are a few months out from Rio+20, and there is a “big conference fatigue” amongst the crowd at the end of 2012. Maybe I'm just disinclined to sift through the rhetoric of the negotiations to see if…
Wednesday, December 5th: deep within the bizarre landscape of minarets, oil refineries that stretch out into the sandy horizon, and a wildly ad hoc, opulent, and strangely 1970’s-going-on-the-future skyline, the annual UNFCCC conference moves along in its second week. In these last days of COP 18, much still remains open and on the table. It appears that there will be a second commitment period to the KP, but what will it look like? Progress on the Durban Platform inches forward – but will any solid groundwork be laid for the 2015 climate agreement? Overall, ambition throughout this COP has been extremely low, with only the most vulnerable nations pressing for fast and dramatic action.
But outside the dry, deadlocked negotiations at the Qatar National Convention Center, things seem…
By Yiting Wang and Angel Hsu
DecisionMakr welcomes you back to the final week of the Doha climate conference. Brief showers of rare rain cleared up the afternoon sky on Saturday, but the battle goes on. As the second week of the Doha climate talks begin, ministers from around the world are arriving, which means the stakes of the negotiations have automatically been raised. Most of the technical discussions (Subsidiary Bodies, etc.) have concluded, and delegations are working overtime to shape up the text for their ministers to hammer out remaining details. Many people especially the youth constituencies welcomed that the Subsidiary Bodies of Implementation adopted the Doha Work Programme on Article 6 of the Convention, which addresses climate change education and garners support and broader participation, including from the…
Shown above are Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah (Left) and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The former; once the director of the office of the Minister of Finance and Petroleum, once the director of the Office of the Minister of Interior and the Acting Minister of Finance and Petroleum, once the Minister of Energy and Industry, and curently director of the Gulf Helicopters Corporation, member of the Directors Board of Gulf Airways Corporation and current director of Qatar Petroleum, is a very down to earth guy with concerns for global climate issues. Enough so that this once OPEC president has become president again of the COP 18 theater show. Although the Qataris have only attended two COPs, this seemed…
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.
