Nathan Thanki

What do countries think about the Durban Platform for enhanced action?

Nathan Thanki November 23, 2012 0 Comments

by nathan thanki Welcome to the first COP of the rest of your lives. Though Copenhagen will forever remain the most widely observed, undermined, devastated, ruinous UNFCCC meeting, it wasn’t until Durban that the sea change became official. US lead negotiator Todd Stern’s famous “if equity is in, we’re out” sneer epitomised the new paradigm that is being cemented in...

How did we get to Doha

Nathan Thanki November 23, 2012 2 Comments

A brief(ish) history of the UNFCCC and a peek into the future by nathan thanki People ask us “what’s going to come out of Doha” as if these negotiations were disconnected from prior negotiations on climate change. A clue is in the name: it is the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18). In order to know what to expect in Doha, we must therefore see it in context; this requires...

An effective environmental treaty? Montreal Protocol.

Nathan Thanki September 27, 2012 2 Comments

by nathan thanki (march 2011) When astronauts first looked out the window of their spacecraft onto the only planet they had ever known, what they would have seen is a thin blue layer enveloping the globe. Without this layer, life on earth would probably not exist. The stratospheric ozone layer contains 90% of the world’s known ozone (Chasek et al 164), and is life giving because it absorbs...

USA v China

Nathan Thanki August 15, 2012 0 Comments

by nathan thanki The USA wants to be treated the same as China when it comes to responsibility for tackling climate change. Many environmental NGOs, in the increasingly panicked calls for climate action now, are also prone to saying things like "well of course the emerged economies of Brazil, India and China must also be obliged to reduce emissions." This plays quite well into...

Adaptation in Bangladesh: closer look at NAPA

Nathan Thanki August 14, 2012 0 Comments

by nathan thanki (Nov 2010) Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation, if not our species. The six billion and counting human inhabitants of the earth will soon be coming up against the full force of this change and the question they will ask is not ‘how can we stop it?’ but rather ‘how can we survive it?’ How can societies adapt themselves in order to be...