Wayfinding

The humidity hits you the instant you walk into the underground parking garage. It is the rainy season in Durban and water is pooled on the exit ramps. The extensive carpeting doesn't help. Hundreds of 18 inch black and grey carpet squares have been laid side by side in every direction. Large concrete columns , conveniently colour coded to tell you where you left your car, are unconvincingly disguised by a sole potted plant leaning against each one. Cement curbs interrupt the chessboard carpet, and I find myself weaving around them, habitually following the rules of the road.

I turn left at a ficus-benjamina, and walk through the stop sign half hidden by a chifera, its five fingered leaves looking unhappy about the lack of natural light. I am looking for Canada. I pass England, Germany, the IPCC, Argentina, and the United States. No Canada. The entire parking garage has been transformed into a warren of wet offices. White plastic dividers have been erected and limp pieces of paper desultorily announce whose office is whose.

An incredibly bored security guard is standing against the far wall. I still haven't found Canada. She opens her map, looks around and points in exactly the direction I just came from. “There”, she says. I follow her advice, but still no Canada, just a copy centre where I can only imagine the headaches awaiting delegates tasked with endless late-night revisions of commas and sub-clauses, stymied by copiers jammed with mountains of damp paper.

I return to the security guard and we look again. Sure enough. The map was upside down, and she had assumed that the colours on the map matched the parking garage columns. But no. Canada is purple, but it is in the pink zone, hidden just around the corner from Indonesia.

I finally stumble across a white plastic room dominated by a white plastic oval table adorned with two tiny Canada flags. A lone woman sits working on a laptop. I ask her when the Canadian briefings are. She looks at me in confusion, “do you mean the stakeholder meetings?” I assume I mean yes, and if not I want to be there anyway, so I confidently reply in the affirmative. “8 am”, she says, “but don't worry, they are upstairs”.

Mission accomplished I turn around to find my way out of the parking garage. Half-way out I run into a flustered woman frantically looking for the IPCC. Feeling rather smug I direct her to turn at the pink columns, go straight past the WTO, and stop before she hits Finland.

Day One: Three Vignettes

The computer centre is so full it is humming with an electronic drone. At the far end of one row a young woman is intently – furiously – hunched over a keyboard. A colleague comes up and asks her how she is. She does not hear him. He tries again and lays a hand on her shoulder. She glares up, enraged by the interruption but relaxes when she sees it is him. “How's it going?” he asks. “Horrible” is the unsurprising response. “I have to finish this report on the plenary. I have a pass but they won't let me in”. He looks her up and down, “well, I guess you look more pro-bono than I do today”.

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Sixteen people, all but two of them women, are seated in a large semi-circle around a television screen. Most are cross-legged on the ground, except for a few older women who have stolen chairs from the nearby computer centre. Most are intent on the screen, but others are half listening. One young woman is checking facebook.

The opening plenary has been running all morning but NGOs were not allocated seats. Instead they were “advised to view the opening on the CCTV monitors located around the conference centre”. I join the group and tuck my feet under me. We listen as representative after representative from the global south makes their case for greater adaptation funding and deeper emission reductions from developed countries. It is unrelenting and genuine.

But no-one is expecting a deal in Durban.

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The city is whizzing by. Fences are topped by swirls of barbed wire. Everyone's windows are covered in bars. I am being read the riot act by Peter, a student at the university. Lacking any means of transportation, and emphatically forbidden by everyone I meet from riding what little public transit exists, I have hired him to drive me the six kilometers to the conference centre. “You must be careful. You must not go out alone”, he tells me. “Just last week a nurse was stabbed five times for her cellphone, that is what is so different from the crime at home in Zambia, here it is violent”.

I look longingly at the city as it passes us. It is alive. Warm, moist air pours in the windows. It is the perfect temperature to be outside. People are doing their shopping, lounging on stoops, leisurely walking inches away from flying vehicles.

We get to the conference centre and I don my badge, go through the first set of gates, then the second, then the security clearance, and finally into the convention centre complex. Open courtyards fluttering with purple flowers spill out of the corridors. Cafes splay open to reveal cast iron chairs and round tables under palm trees. It could almost trick us into believing we are free, except for the urban hum the fences cannot exclude.

On Refusing to Rollover

Lead me from death to life,

from falsehood to truth;

lead me from despair to hope,

from fear to trust;

lead me from hate to love,

from war to peace.

Let peace fill our hearts,

our world, our universe.

Peace.

…………………………………………...................................

“I’m not going, what’s the point?"

We are standing in a room decorated by pictures of solar panels, hydrogen cars and a flamboyant Amazonian lizard I expect is endangered. As is usual these days, the topic of conversation is COP17. I have just told a colleague that I am heading to Durban. He used to attend the UNFCCC meetings but does not see the point in doing so anymore. Afterall, we all know nothing productive will come from it anyway.

Japan has washed its hands of the Kyoto Protocol. So too have Canada and Russia. The United States never was on board. The European Union is frantically plugging leaks in its dyke, trying to avoid the tidal wave of Euro failure. Emissions might soon drop in Europe, but it certainly won’t be due to climate policy.

Meanwhile, it’s estimated that at least two new coal-powered plants are built each week in China. The International Energy Association, an institute instigated by Henry Kissinger, recently released its latest energy outlook. According to the first line of this document, “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change” if deep changes in global policy are not forthcoming.

My colleague isn’t alone in his sentiments. The climate change policy community has many disputes, but it appears the single thing it agrees on is that no positive agreements are likely in Durban. What do we do now?

……………………

The room is silent. Ugly blue-upholstered chairs are positioned in a circle around a wooden table holding several books, and a few stems of flowers in a glass vase. A furtive beam of light bounces off the plain white walls. The room is full of people and utterly still. The woman next to me has a cold. I can hear the slight catch in her breathe as she inhales.

A grey-haired man in front of me suddenly stands up. His voice reverberates through the silence. He has been watching the news. Climate change is getting worse. Economic reforms are needed but have not been forthcoming. We have been abandoned by our leaders. He knows this.

He knows this, and his daughter knows it too. However, his daughter is going to Durban anyway. She is going to Durban with an environmental organization because something has to be done.

“I am terribly proud of these young people. I am proud of these young people who are refusing to rollover and play dead”

Silence returns when he sits down.

………………………

Another day. Another room. A research group is seated around a long oval table.

A senior researcher is speaking. He has been circling the climate change problem for almost 20 years from every conceivable angle.

He starts from a simple premise. Whatever policy efforts we have made to address climate change so far haven’t worked. 20 years of effort, little positive change. It’s a depressing equation.

At the end of his talk he stops, leans back in his chair, and says, “so, now let me tell you what I think about Durban”.

His first thought isn’t terribly surprising, “nothing is going to come out of Durban”.

The next thought is more interesting. His view is that the entire conversation has to change, we’ve been approaching it the wrong way. For too long we have been waiting for action from big countries like the US. These countries can’t and won’t move. Their economies are in shambles. The oil industry is too powerful.

His suggestion is simple, and would make Margaret Mead proud. Starting big didn’t work, so lets try starting small. Lets start with a committed coalition of the willing and build change from there.

Riding my bike home in the dark I think of colleagues, friends and family who are working everyday to do just this. Starting small. Making changes. Trying new ways of imagining what could be. They are refusing to rollover and play dead. And I am terribly proud of them.

(Note: I did not write the prayer at the beginning of this post. This is the Prayer for Peace.)

It's Started, Be What May

Well, it’s started. It is November and there is something undefinable but unmistakable in the air. A collective breathlessness. The edge of anticipation. As I enter the large doors and go up the escalators I recognize the slightly frantic glaze in everybody’s eyes because I have it too. Its almost here and there is still so much to do.

I am, of course, talking about COP17 of the UNFCCC. COP17 is the seventeenth ‘Conference of the Parties’ of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A small band of negotiators work on developing some semblance of international climate policy year-round, but this is the crucial annual event designed to formalize and implement the global political response to climate change. Within days thousands of people will board airplanes destined for Durban, South Africa where two weeks of networking and negotiation in sprawling convention centres and non-descript hotel boardrooms await them. For bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, academics, journalists, heads of state, and civil society leaders the pace of life is rapidly accelerating. There are strategies to clarify. Predictions to be made. Reports to be released.

There are only two remotely notable features about the meeting room I walk into on this November afternoon. The first is the assortment of people balancing gummy white bread sandwiches on paper plates. There are 15 wooden chairs around the table. I count representatives from the embassies of three powerful countries, four internationally recognized academics, and several senior negotiators from the wealthy developed country that is hosting the meeting. An assistant discreetly stands at the ready between the door and the coffee.

The second notable thing is me. My gender, my youth and my unimportance prevent me from blending in. I am one of only two women; the other is the wife of the chair of the meeting. In my green wool dress, I am the only person not wearing a grey or black power suit. There appears to be only one other person under the age of 40, and I am the only one whom everyone else does not already know. The chair mentions that he and several others in the room have been attending COPs since COP3. This represents 14 years of climate change negotiating at the highest level.

We have gathered today to hear what opening stance this specific wealthy developed country has decided it will take. I imagine identical meetings are happening in equally bland meeting rooms around the globe. This is the chance for negotiators to test their arguments, fish for support and delineate areas of mutual interest with other players that might emerge.

The stage is carefully set to allow us to see the logic, indeed the natural evolution, of their central stance. It starts with a consideration of what I expect is the single-most referenced piece of the UNFCCC, Article 3. This crucial text begins thus:

"The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities."

The initial Kyoto Protocol, birthed in the fateful COP3 of the UNFCCC, used this text to draw a razor-sharp line in the sand between developed and developing countries. Developed countries made legally binding promises to reduce greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions. Developing countries faced no obligations. It was felt that developed countries could charge ahead, bear the initial costs for the GHGs they had historically emitted, and that developing countries could eventually contribute as they were able, buoyed by unceasing economic growth and steadily decreasing costs of emission reductions through technological innovation.

Fast-forward 14 years and the landscape has changed. Emissions have skyrocketed worldwide. Developed countries found it far harder than expected to reduce emissions for a variety of political, economic and technical reasons and few have met their obligations. Meanwhile several developing countries, most notably China, have experienced explosions of growth and emissions.

Like developed countries around the world, our host developed country is not particularly keen to commit itself to deep reductions of GHGs unless countries like India and China do as well. The negotiators meticulously point us to the last two words of the article, respective capabilities. The argument is neither complicated nor new. It could be paraphrased like this; “In the UNFCCC we all agreed to do our part based on what we could do. Many developing countries are now able to carry part of the burden, so we, as a developed country, are not willing to move forward on any further emission reductions until they do too”. Paraphrase it a little further and you get something like, “I won’t go until you go first”.

A number of those in the room shift uncomfortably at this aggressive play. The argument we have just been presented is deeply contentious because it suggests a complete overhaul of long-standing global obligations and their associated costs. India and several other developing countries are completely committed to maintaining the Kyoto divisions. Several academics and an embassy representative suggest softening the stance to minimize the alienation it will necessarily cause in India, China and other developing countries.

Another academic, one who has never attended a COP but who is an internationally recognized energy economist, attacks it more directly, stressing that this line of argument could unravel the already threadbare global commitment to reduce emissions. Surely, he argues, some cooperation would reap maximum emission reductions at a minimum cost.

The lead negotiator, a kindly looking gentleman who has clearly thought this through and seen it all in his years of service, leans forward and gives the academic a bemused smile. “But this is political reality”, he says, “this is how the game is played”.

We break for tea and biscuits and the room swells with muted chatter. I find myself in a small cluster with two of the academics discussing Durban and its possible outcomes. The younger but more experienced one sagely dips his stale shortbread into his tea. “I’m worried”, he states, “I think Durban could be a very dangerous COP. Sometimes it is better not to talk than to talk. Maybe we need to stop talking”.

Riding the tube on my way home I reflect on what he has said. He is not the first person I have heard expressing deep ambivalence about the utility of continuing to meet for the UNFCCC. If I am correct, and meetings like the one I just attended are being held around the world, and if negotiating stances elsewhere are crystallizing in fundamentally irresolvable ways, then he might be right. Durban could simply dig a deeper hole for a global stalemate.

I check my email when I get home. My e-ticket has arrived. I leave for Durban in a few days. Whether the UNFCCC should meet or not is moot. We are committed now, be what may.