Wow. What an insane couple of weeks. What was supposed to go into history books as a unique opportunity to tackle dangerous climate change, has resulted in a ‘half-baked text’ of 3 pages – the result of 2 years of preparation and 300 pages negotiating text, and a last-minute non-democratic process between a hand-full of countries, behind closed doors, surpassing the UN system and democracy. Founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, declared the UN system dead, illustrating that yesterday’s diplomatic institutions are not prepared for tomorrow’s complex challenges.
What we have seen is typical old-school economics and status-quo diplomacy, a form of international negotiations not fit to tackle the huge complexity of climate change in society, and not respecting the historical responsibility of industrialised countries to finance mitigation and to provide proper adaptation support, in order to bridge the gap in capacities to mitigate emissions, accelerate the growth towards a clean economy, and to cope with the consequences of climate change, especially in developing countries.
Looking at the buzz on the ground at Bella Center, it was an insane circus: the most complex and biggest conference ever, accompanied by the biggest demonstration on climate change ever, 40,000 representatives from civil society, hundreds of side events, more than 1,500 young people attending, organised within the YOUNGOs constituency.
The slogan of many major civil society organisations during COP15 echoed ‘climate justice’, often without explaining the often complex theoretical background behind the rationale, but clearly showing the urgent need of a debate on the moral rationale behind climate governance.
Access restrictions
In the second week of COP15, thousands of delegates and observers, having the right to access to the Bella Center, had to wait for at least 6 hours or more (some even 10 hours) outside in the cold, before getting in. They had to squeeze through the security checks, the queues in front of the registration and the cloakroom. Even the plenary room, where the official negotiations and speeches were goong on, was a no go area for most observers, showing the fear for any interventions and demonstrations initiated by civil society. Many people even came to Copenhagen with high expectations, finding themselves locked out entirely from the Bella Center due to access restrictions on the last days, showing how the logistical side of COP15 has failed.
COP15 saw the première of the YOUNGOs consituency, an unprecendented, though somewhat bureaucratic coalition of youth organisations, converging their voice in the official negotiations. This was a movement build upon Article 6 of the Convention of the UNFCCC, aiming for an increase in participation, education and awareness on climate change issues.
The hope of young people
This COP15 also showed that young people are not only the future leaders in this world – it was an impressive show of passionate and committed leaders of a movement of movements. The Young & Future Generation’s Day on the 10th of December, showed the hope and compassion that lies with young people – the premise that they can be major change in challenging the status quo and finding new innovative solutions for living together on a hot, flat and crowded planet.
WSC-SD co-organised a side event on this day together with 350.org and other NGOs, launching its eBook ‘RE:SOLUTIONS – 21 young leaders on climate change’ and debating the role of youth in increasing public leverage for effect policies, as well as the role of youth in inspiring thought-leaders with new solutions and innovations.
The day after, four young people presented their solutions for a sustainable future during a PlanetCall side event, and WSC-SD’s board member Christopher Baan handed over the first digital copy of the eBook ‘Re:solutions’ to Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council. The voice of youth was echoed in many side events, as well as in the official delegations.
As a round-up on COP15, the WSC-SD organised a side event on the 18th of December on Youth & student collaboration beyond Copenhagen, just before Obama’s (infamous) speech. The side event brought together around 30 youth NGOs and entrepreneurs, in total 60 participants sharing their ideas and concrete next steps for the youth movement to converge, to create synergies between organisations from different sectors, and to move beyond politics alone in the run-up to next COP meetings.
To here and much further
The general disappointment among NGOs and scientists over the official outcome of COP15, has not only led to public disapproval of the UN system and the effort of world leaders. It has also led to a new wave of focus on solutions and innovations, on new sources of hope. The Dutch Minister for Environment even declared the UN system not the appriopriate arena anymore, to discuss climate change measures. More and more initiatives are born out of the wish and urge to provide solutions based on entrepreneurial actitivies.
Besides that, scientists are trying to draw the contours of climate governance beyond 2012, acknowledging that the world has become fundamentally more complex and more multi-layered, calling for new models of negotiation and new platforms to represent necessary voices.
All these initiatives should give us the much-needed hope, inspiration and tools to go forward and collaborate on projects that have a real impact.
It’s clear that we can’t afford to wait for politics to fail – the young generation will have to take up the challenge and responsibility to collaboratively design a bright green future. We have to do it together, and fast.
As William Gibson said: ‘The future is already here. It’s only unevenly distributed.’
October 24th is shaping up to be the most widespread day of environmental action in the history of the planet (more than 4000 activities in 170 countries). All events are designed to do one thing: show the support for the most important number in the world: 350. Get a glimpse of the buzz here, or spread the news to friends.
So what’s this 350 about? 350 is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide—measured in “Parts Per Million” in our atmosphere. 350 PPM—it’s the number humanity needs to get back to as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change. Read more at 350.org…
Today, on October 15th 2009, more then 13,000 bloggers all over the world are writing about “Climate Change”, the topic of the 2009 Blog Action Day.
Lately, a couple of interesting articles have caught my attention. They all seem to tell a story of a Great Story, they all seem to put our human race and developments of our time in a much bigger picture.
Scientists in the well-respected journal Nature have tried to quantify the planetary boundaries on which our economy is balancing, ranging from climate change to chemical pollution. Politicians are trying to grapple with the extreme complex challenge of reaching an international – or preferably a transgovernmental – agreement on tackling climate change this December in Copenhagen, coined the most urgent challenge of recent human history. Scientists at have recently coined the name Anthropocene, to try to reflect the immense impact the human race has on planetary systems in the last decades and centuries: we have achieved a species extinction rate to rival great extinction events of all geologic time as well as a rapidly acidifying ocean, dwindling ice caps, and even sinking river deltas.
It might be difficult to keep the head cool and not to devolve into doom thinking with an overwhelming amount of threats, challenges and scenarios channeled to us in an overwhelming amount of media that only the ‘Generation Y‘ is capable of digesting.
A good friend and recent colleague, Pieter Ploeg, wrote some interesting thoughts on his blog today:
Maybe the most important question of today should be written in every single newspaper every day, in all school text books, tweets, blogs, television shows, etc:
How on earth do we want to live together?
Our prevailing attitudes, standards and environmental conditions of groups, periods and places need to become different, altered, modified, transformed or converted. It is so important to not only focus on reducing our emissions, but to consciously leapfrog our thinking and perception into a radically new perspective.
Constantly.
Environmental Climate Change and the story of CO2 is just a chapter in the journey of global human and natural development.
We need to ask ourselves this fundamental question, constantly. Challenge our peers, friends, family, colleagues, leaders of business, politicians, scientists, world leaders…
Probably one of the most promising solutions out there is in the economic field. Der Spiegel recently challenged the unquestioned fate in GDP as indicator for growth: Do we need economic growth? Is economic growth equal welfare growth? GDP has been used for measuring the wealth of nations for almost eight decades. It doesn’t, however, reveal whether the economy is sustainable in the long run. An expert commission comprised of the world’s best economists is working on an updated version of the old yardstick. President Sarkozy was one of the first this year to seriously research the possibilities to integrate new values of ‘welfare’ and ‘happiness’ in the new GD, just as the king of Bhutan does already for decades.
What we need in Copenhagen during the climate talks is more than pure self interest, even more than altruism. It is the realization that it is in our own interest as an interdependent, interconnected world that we all have the opportunity and responsibility to be part of the solution. To be able to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma of climate negotiations. This means not only a shift in technology or policy, it means a shift in thinking, it means breakthrough thinking and big ideas. Climate change might well challenge today’s status quo governance and thinking. It’s just a chapter in the journey of global human and natural development.
Global climate change is perhaps the most pressing and important problem currently facing humanity. It is also unique by virtue of being a truly systemic problem of vast complexity: it affects every one of us, and is directly affected by every one of our actions. Like nothing else, dealing with climate change calls upon us to engage in effective collective decision making on a global scale.
The spectacular emergence of the Internet and associated information technology has enabled unprecedented opportunities for such interactions. To date, however, these interactions have been incoherent and dispersed, contributions vary widely in quality, and there has been no clear way to converge on well-supported decisions concerning what actions, both grand and ground-level, humanity should take to solve its most pressing problems.
The goal of this project is to address this important challenge through the creation of a new class of web-mediated discussion and decision making forum, called the “Collaboratorium”. This system, currently under development, will use an innovative combination of internet-mediated interaction, collectively generated idea repositories, computer simulation, and explicit representation of argumentation to help large, diverse, and geographically-dispersed groups systematically explore, evaluate, and come to decisions concerning systemic challenges.
Young Internationalist is a place on the internet where references to interesting articles are collected around the subjects of international affairs, globalization, sustainable development, social issues, politics, developing world, world citizenship, art & technology, and architecture. It gives a young, fresh view on the world. It is meant to inspire fellow young people around the world to contribute to sustainable development, international justice and bridging the gap between rich and poor.
Young Internationalist is a weblog by Christopher Baan
Wow. What an insane couple of weeks. What was supposed to go into history books as a unique opportunity to tackle dangerous climate change, has resulted in a ‘half-baked text’ of 3 pages – the result of 2 years of preparation and 300 pages negotiating text, and a last-minute non-democratic process between a hand-full of countries, behind closed doors, surpassing the UN system and democracy. Founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, declared the UN system dead, illustrating that yesterday’s diplomatic institutions are not prepared for tomorrow’s complex challenges.
