Time to come up with solutions

by Samuli Sinisalo The final negotitations in Durban just began. The different negotiating bodies will meet in this order: Ad-hod working group on Kyoto Protocol, Ad-hoc working group on Long Term Cooperative Action, Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to Kyoto Protocol and finally the closing plenary of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC. It’s 9pm on Saturday,...

unF**C our future

-nathan thanki So while the AWG-KP plenary is suspended for Parties to get their heads together, let's have a little fun. Late one night in the first week a few of us were sitting round the table of Hippo Hide backpackers. Samuli came in shouting about final outcomes, and we decided to all write down our predictions and keep them for the final night. Well that night is now upon us friends. Here...

An appeal to sanity

by nathan thanki Yesterday, a large group of civil society--mostly youth--took the voice and anger of the street into the halls of the UN. While it could never have been a true #occupy--COP is inherently segregated into those with badges and those without; those with pink badges and those with yellow--the idea was still to say: enough is enough. You have had 20 years to negotiate a fair,...

COP-upy

by Nathan Thanki and Trudi Zundel Last week the people marched past the UNFCCC meetings with trucks, horns and speakerphones blasting political messages for the delegates inside negotiating over the future of the planet. No one inside blinked an eye. A crowd of maybe 50 people gathered by the gated walkway to see them march, and horsed policemen barred every potential entrance. We were left...

Yields of the Night Vigil

by Anjali Appadurai I started this post at 4am, and worked on it intermittently until now - 9:30am. No new LCA text, no sleep. These ministers worked through the night, and through the documents they released from their "indaba" at a couple of different intervals, we have some meagre updates. The indaba high-level consultations convened at midnight and are still going strong, with three draft...