The pre-COP: a chance we must take

by Maria Escalante & Adrian Fernandez Jauregui Coming to the Conference of the Parties this year at Warsaw, Poland (COP19) confirmed us that climate change negotiations, under the UNFCCC, are not advancing in even reducing the only incremental climate change impacts, much less considerably mitigating global carbon emissions, transferring resources for adaptation, or fairly compensating...

Designing for Activism

by nathan thanki There are a surprising many similarities between designing on a computer and designing “in reality,” with bodies instead of pixels. Designing a poster requires many of the same skills as designing a creative direct action. Both are attempting to convey a message, often a demand or a request, through largely visual rhetoric which, like spoken language, has been developed...

Days 12 & 13 Policy Updates: Muddles and Huddles

by Earth in Brackets team and friends Negotiations in Warsaw carried on essentially non-stop from Wednesday morning until Saturday night, with many delegates not sleeping for at least the final 48 hours. There were three concurrent issues being negotiated over the course of Friday and Saturday: finance, loss and damage, and the ADP draft text. Finance and loss and damage were in closed contact...

Days 10-11 Policy Updates: The Storm Before the Storm

By Nathan Thanki with input from Katie O'Brien, Anjali Appadurai, and others. Photos by Rachel Wells In short, the negotiations are falling apart. We say that with utmost respect for the work being done by our negotiator allies and friends among civil society observers. It is not their fault. Nor is it the fault of the UNFCCC per se, though its Secretariat must shoulder some blame. The...

“You have never seen a coalition like this before”

by Lara Shirley and J. Taggart Wass Today, in an unprecedented show of solidarity between all elements of civil society, there was a massive walkout of COP19.  The action involved 800 members of civil society protesting the complete lack of progress in this year’s conference. The move was a culmination of many different frustrations: the corporate takeover of the UNFCCC space, the continued...