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…
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…
Climate change once more attracts the attention of Heads of States, country negotiators, civil society, the private sector and individuals from around the globe as we approach the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Doha, Qatar, in only 2 weeks. One may hypothesize that the very diversity of backgrounds that participants bring to the conference exemplifies one of the main problems of the climate negotiations – how can fruitful communication really be enabled to unify the different areas of work in climate change?
The world will be watching closely as Party countries negotiate in the official climate change negotiations of the international community, over a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which to date is…
