Copenhagen

The business of climate change – who really bears the burden?

by Gareth December 11, 2009

This guest post comes from Mahara Inglis (left) and Oliver Bruce, members of the New Zealand Youth Delegation to COP15 in Copenhagen, who describe themselves as “a group of 12 young people passionate about ensuring our climate policies look after the planet for generations to come!” The original was posted at Mahara’s blog. They make [...]

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More than a number

by Gareth December 10, 2009

If you want to know what’s happening on a stockmarket, the first place to look is at the relevant index — the Footsie (FTSE) for the London Stock Exchange, or the Dow Jones for Wall Street. Those indices aggregate all the price movements over a day into one handy number, to give a quick overview [...]

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Copenhagen: opening thoughts

by Gareth December 9, 2009

Delegates at the opening ceremony for COP15 — the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen — had to sit through this video, so I think you should too. It’s a fitting introduction to the next couple of weeks. There are not enough hours in the day [...]

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Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation

by Gareth December 9, 2009

This editorial was published yesterday by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. No newspapers in New Zealand or Australia carried the message. As a call to action, I believe it’s worth featuring here in full, and I am happy to endorse both the content and the sentiment expressed. [...]

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A thread of hope

by Bryan Walker December 2, 2009

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 1st December Do we lament that the Copenhagen Conference is evidently not going to produce a binding global deal to tackle climate change?  Or can we take comfort from the likelihood that it will produce an agreement in principle and proceed to further legal negotiations [...]

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Marvellous distempered: the Copenhagen diagnosis

by Gareth November 25, 2009

The Copenhagen climate conference (COP15) opens its doors in a little under two weeks. To update participants on the science of climate a new assessment report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, was released yesterday, and it makes grim reading. Designed to inform “a target readership of policy-makers, stakeholders, the media and the broader public” about the evidence [...]

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Four degrees too far

by Gareth October 23, 2009

The British government has stepped up its pre-Copenhagen campaign for a global emissions deal, yesterday releasing this interactive map of what a 4ºC temperature increase would mean for the world. Click on the map to explore the impacts listed across the bottom. A larger (full page) version is available here, and background here and here. [...]

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Doctors orders: NZ “must rapidly halve its greenhouse emissions”

by Gareth October 9, 2009

In a hard-hitting article in today’s New Zealand Medical Journal, a group of senior health professionals call for NZ to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The spokesperson for the recently formed Climate and Health Group, Dr Alex Macmillan says: Climate change has been described as the biggest global health threat of the 21st [...]

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How not to negotiate #1

by Gareth October 1, 2009

New Zealand’s commitment to piffling and highly conditional emissions targets appears to have been weakened even further by chief negotiator Adrian Macey’s admission in an interview with Point Carbon that if the conditions aren’t met: “…we reserve the right to drop (our target) below 10 per cent.” As Geoff Key of Greenpeace notes, this is [...]

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Postcard from Bangkok

by Gareth September 30, 2009

This is a guest blog from Oxfam NZ’s executive director Barry Coates, in Bangkok for the latest round of negotiations in the run-up to Copenhagen. Barry sets the scene: Tcktcktck. The clock counts down to the deadline for climate change negotiations. Not to achieve an agreement is unthinkable. It was good last week to hear [...]

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