UN

Coates in Cancún: we have no more time

by Gareth December 6, 2010

Oxfam NZ’s Barry Coates continues his series of on the spot reports from Cancún: in this episode, he looks at the way international negotiations work… Negotiations have picked up pace in Cancún. But it is impossible not to feel frustrated with how long it has taken to get to this point. The problem is not [...]

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Can Cancún’s COP deliver?

by Gareth November 30, 2010

Another year, another Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, number 16 in a series that looks set to run and run. Mexico is the host, Cancún the seaside resort where thousands of diplomats, negotiators, activists and apparatchiks are gathering to have another go at sorting out a successor [...]

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Money (that’s what I want)

by Bryan Walker October 12, 2010

I participated a few days ago in a Friends of the Earth urgent email action concerning US stances on the proposed Global Climate Fund through which developed countries will give financial assistance to developing countries in tackling the impacts of climate change. Friends of the Earth were alarmed by the US push for the management [...]

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Anyway, anyhow, anywhere

by Bryan Walker October 5, 2010

Two modestly hopeful signs from the political world struck me when reading today’s Guardian news. One was the opening of the climate change talks at Tainjin in China aimed at refining possible goals for the Cancun talks in November-December. The comment of Oxfam observer Kelly Dent attracted my attention. Oxfam is a careful watchdog of [...]

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Tumbling dice

by Gareth August 23, 2010

Statement of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Mahmood Qureshi to the UN general assembly: Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis. The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change. It also complicates the reconstruction and rehabilitation scenario in Pakistan. Nature [...]

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The King will come

by Bryan Walker June 17, 2010

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, has not retired into quiet obscurity since leaving that position. He co-authored the book The Hot Topic (reviewed here) in 2008 and works as director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford, which addresses the major environmental threats and opportunities [...]

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Conference in Bolivia: who pays the price of change?

by Bryan Walker April 21, 2010

“We are very worried because we have no water. Half the people of this community have already left. Those who remain are struggling with the lack of water.”   Those are the words of a villager in a small Bolivian village called Khapi which is suffering from the effects of retreating glaciers in the Andes.  [...]

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Who will rule the waves?

by Bryan Walker April 4, 2010

Cleo Paskal, whose book Global Warring was reviewed recently on Hot Topic, has been speaking in New Zealand and left her card by way of an article in the Herald.  In it she focuses on one matter raised in her book – the fate of island nations whose land becomes uninhabitable because of rising seas.  [...]

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After Copenhagen: new world disorder

by Gareth December 23, 2009

It’s a bit like reading the runes — trawling through reactions to the events of the last couple of weeks, trying to work out what the Copenhagen Accord means. I don’t mean a parsing of the words, though translating the language of diplomacy is never trivial, but what the various parties to the Accord, and [...]

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Climate compendium: important insights

by Bryan Walker September 28, 2009

“The Climate Change Science Compendium is a wake-up call. The time for hesitation is over”. So wrote Ban Ki-moon in his foreword to this UN Environment Programme publication released last week. The publication is a review of how climate science has evolved since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), and is based on some 400 major scientific contributions [...]

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