Chefforhandler brød sammen og rettede dybt personlig appel til de delegerede: Kan I se jeres børn i øjnene! – Climate change in the twilight zone. Doha was a heady cocktail of questions around survival, existence, science, nationalism, equity (lighed), class, faith, trust and big money.
IRIN reporter Jaspreet Kindra was in Doha, Qatar, to cover the humanitarian implications of the UN climate change conference. She filed this personal account of the talks.
DOHA, 11 December 2012 (IRIN): Covering the UN climate change talks is, in many ways, a surreal experience. This year’s talks – the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – were held in Doha’s futuristic Qatar National Convention Centre.
The front of the centre is propped up by structures shaped like huge tree trunks (træstammer), and the inside is bathed in an eerie (uhyggelig) blue and green light, with a giant spider (edderkop) guarding the main foyer. The fact that you are always deprived of sleep during the marathon talks lends to the sense of otherworldliness.
But the sense of disconnectedness really sinks in when rushing from a press event featuring a squabble (mundhuggeri) over the inclusion or exclusion of certain phrases in texts under negotiation to another by residents of small islands making an emotional appeal to save their people from imminent destruction (på grund af de stigende verdenshave, red.).
Når selv stærke mænd går ned
It is not unusual for negotiators from countries steeped in the destructive realities of climate change to suddenly breakdown at the irrationality of it all – as Naderev Sano, chief negotiator from Philippines, did this year.
His country is currently grappling with the aftermath of deadly Typhoon Bopha.
Climatologist Jeff Masters says Bopha is the third category 5 typhoon to hit the Western Pacific this year, and the strongest typhoon to slam the Philippine island of Mindanao, which “rarely sees strong typhoons due to its position close to the equator”.
He explains: “Tropical cyclones rarely form so close to the equator because they cannot leverage the Earth’s rotation to get themselves spinning (komme op i gear på grund af Jordens rotation, red.).”
We cannot really tell if climate change had anything to do with Bopha’s unusual path of destruction, but many scientists believe global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme events.
During his appeal, a clearly overwhelmed Sano turned to the other negotiators to ask if they would be able to look their children in the eye and say they had done their best to avert catastrophe.
Sano had raised similar emotional questions during the climate talks in Durban last year.
“Selvmordspagten” i København
It recalled a moment in 2009, during the talks in Copenhagen – regarded as the worst COP – when Lumumba Di-Aping, lead negotiator of the G77 and China, broke down and said they had been asked to sign a suicide pact.
He asked what President Barrack Obama would say to his daughters.
And during the very first UN climate talks I covered, in Bali in 2007, I stumbled onto two representatives from Bangladesh crying on the steps outside the conference centre.
They were distraught (fortvivlede over) that they were unable to keep up with counterarguments from developed countries’ impressive legal armoury.
I spend most of every year covering attempts by poor countries to deal with extreme climate events like the droughts. I, too, find it difficult to reconcile a world in which poor countries are unable to adapt to (tilpasse sig) climate change with the COPs’ barter of words and ideologies.
Tilliden er væk
This year’s was no different from previous talks.
But the debates were heightened as 2012 signals the end of the first commitment phase of the Kyoto Protocol, and of the 2007 long-term cooperative agreement (LCA) on providing support, in the form of finance and technology, to developing countries to help them reduce their emissions and adapt.
The LCA had been an effort to draw the US – which has not signed the Kyoto Protocol – into the process.
The US had maintained that China and India, now also major emitters of greenhouse gas, should take on mandatory emission-cutting targets like the rest of the developed world.
China and India, on the other hand, argued that they could not afford to curb industrial growth to reduce emissions. Under the LCA, China, India and rest of the developing world agreed to take on voluntary emission cuts.
The US joined on to that agreement – but it is ending this year. And a number of LCA issues remained unresolved, particularly the matter of providing finance and technological support to developing countries.
Such support has been inconsistent and inadequate, obliterating (ødelægger) any sense of trust between the poor and rich countries. Many of these unresolved issues have been deferred to next year’s talks (COP19) in Poland.
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97022/CLIMATE-CHANGE-In-the-twilight-zone
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