Dr Stephanie Midgley

How invigorating to get out of the office once in a while and interact with “real people” in the region rather than names in your email contact list! The RCCP is first and foremost a programme and partnership for and with the people of Southern Africa. I am learning fast how people from all walks of life have a wealth of experience to share around climate change and how it is already impacting on their lives and work. From the subsistence farmers I have spoken to in Lesotho (end 2009), to government officials in Zambia (two weeks ago for an RCCP climate change survey), there is no doubt in most people’s minds that climate change is already happening and is here to stay. What I find so fascinating is how no amount of academic research and conference dialogue can replace the knowledge some people have of the interlinkages between climate and poverty in their local or national context.

“We need to invest in campaigns to help people realise that poverty is linked to the climate change phenomenon,” one official told me.

In the south of Zambia, recurring droughts and crop failures have forced farmers to migrate to the wetter, more forested northern provinces, where they are adding tremendous pressure on their new environment by escalating deforestation—mainly for charcoal burning. This leads to severe land degradation, which renders these rural communities ever more vulnerable to the impacts of more frequent heavy rainfalls, alternating with drought. This is a vicious cycle driven by poverty and high reliance on the land and its increasingly fragile resources.

Nonetheless, there is little understanding among the general population of the linkages between what they are experiencing “on the ground” and what is causing it (both climatic and human-induced). A number of people I spoke with in Lusaka made the point that local communities have been left behind in the dialogues and processes that are occurring institutionally at international and national level. Improved knowledge about the causes and impacts of climate change must be facilitated within the communities that are going to bear the brunt of the changes—they will be central in all efforts to adapt to the new conditions.

“Communities must be incorporated into all climate change activities, since implementation must take place within the local environment. They must have ownership of the processes so that they can appreciate the benefits that response actions will bring them. At present, there is a concentration of activities at strategic, tactical and operational level, but it hasn’t trickled down to the people,” one interviewee said.

As the RCCP moves forward towards developing regional, transboundary collaboration on climate change responses, let us not forget the millions of people across the region, each with a story to tell, who, armed with information and knowledge, would be able to identify what they as individuals and communities can do to partner with their governments and local organisations in addressing climate change.

Agriculturalist Dr Stephanie Midgley is currently in charge of research into land use and food security for the Regional Climate Change Programme, a five-year climate change response programme headed by OneWorld and funded by the UK Department for International Development.

A few years ago I read this fabulous little factoid: it takes something like 66 calories of energy to ship every one calorie of carrot from South Africa to the European supermarket. Okay, I’m a bit rusty on the exact figure (was it 66 or 86?) but the point is that it took a lot more energy to get our root crop onto a northern plate than the person eating it actually got from the food itself.

Let’s take that a step further—those 66-odd calories of energy correlate to grams of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Makes you think, huh?

I was reminded of this during one of the many post-mortems that happened in the wake of the Copenhagen climate summit (and haven’t we had those up to the gills by now!). During the discussion, a prominent activist made the point that civil society needs to lobby the public to start viewing the climate crisis in terms of energy.

This raises some interesting questions in the context of our carrot story—imagine how differently we’d view the meat-and-three-veg on our plate if we saw it as more than just a tasty ensemble of nutrients, more than just a social occasion, more than a full tummy and generally satisfied disposition.

What if we saw it as so-many grams of carbon shunted up into the atmosphere from all the energy needed to farm, ship, process or chill before you got to eat it? Would we start to use food differently?

The vast majority of energy used up by our cars every time we drive goes into just moving around the sheer bulk of the vehicle and only a fraction into moving us around. My (relatively small) car weighs 1.3 tons, I weigh 60-cough-cough kgs—there’s a lot of metal and rubber that needs propulsion before my flesh and bones get to move from A to B.

Equate those calories “wasted” on moving the car around to grams of carbon, then equate that to the eventual link with a drought that pinches off rain to our staple crops, or a heat wave that stalls a city for a week, or a storm surge that swamps the local harbour.

We probably need to make all these connections (think waste, transport, food, lighting and heating, you name it) if we’re to impact how society responds to the climate crisis: it’s no longer a distant threat from a slightly unfathomable atmospheric system. Rather, it’s an immediate and real concern, linked to our daily decisions around how we use and abuse energy. Until we’ve made that link in the public imagination, the disconnect between how we talk about climate change and how we act on it is going to remain cavernous. Even as we sit through yet another analysis of why we keep failing in our global efforts to breathe into being an international climate law.

Food for thought

Since we’re on the topic of food, here are some interesting observations from a discussion on food that happened this week, courtesy of the think tank, the Cambridge Resilience Forum.

Speaking on the issue of food security, Dr Gina Ziervogel from the University of Cape Town’s Climate Systems Analysis Group pointed out that keeping a society “food secure” was about so much more than just securing the production and shipment of food. Yet it’s this that most of us latch on to when we think about whether or not a community goes to bed hungry or full.

It’s also about how people access that food (think cost and allocation). Remember that dreadful famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s? It wasn’t that there was no food around, but that the poor people couldn’t afford to buy it.

Food security is also about the value people ascribe to food. South African palates have been weaned off sorghum and millet, for instance, and people have forgotten how to prepare it. Now they prefer the taste of maize even though it’s less drought resistant. Food safety is another issue—and rising temperatures and more extreme heat events are expected to increase the incidence of salmonella in foods, making the cold chain more critical than ever in shipping certain foods.

Understanding what drives food security is particularly relevant now since more than half the world’s population live in cities today—and that’s expected to swell to 75 percent by 2050 of a nine billion-strong global population count.

We’re going to have to keep this mass sufficiently well fed. And this will likely have to happen in a world where there’s no more cheap oil to ship food halfway across the globe to reach the markets, and where the atmosphere can’t afford to absorb any more of the emissions needed to get it between one hemisphere’s farm and another’s table.

1. TAKES NOTE of the report of H E Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the coordinator of the Conference of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC), on the conduct and outcomes of the 15th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009;

2. ENDORSES the provisions of the Copenhagen Accord and ENCOURAGES all member states that may wish to do so, to make individual submissions to the Secretariat of UNFCCC supporting the Accord in the context of the common but differential responsibilities and supported with the means of implementation;

3. REAFFIRMS its continued stand to remain united in all future negotiations on climate change; and ENDORSES that the leadership of H E Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, as coordinator of CAHOSCC, be extended to lead CAHOSCC for the next two Conferences of Parties (COP16 in Mexico and COP17 in South Africa, in 2010 and 2011, respectively);

4.    REQUESTS CAHOSCC to establish a streamlined single negotiating structure at the ministerial and expert levels to replace the current coordinating mechanism;

5.    ALSO REQUESTS CAHOSCC to hold a Post-COP 15 meeting before the conference in Bonn, Germany, in May, 2010, in order to prepare for all the other
meetings identified in the report of the CAHOSCC chairperson;
One reservation entered by Egypt, adopted by the 14th ordinary aession of the Assembly in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 2 February, 2010

6. FURTHER REQUESTS the chairperson of the Commission to take all necessary measures to register the African Union as a party to the UNFCCC, for purposes of negotiation but consistent with the sovereign right of its member states.

As a veteran of UN negotiations on sustainable development, I view Copenhagen as the most intense and complicated negotiations probably ever witnessed in the UN. As a colleague remarked, the technical negotiations have become too political for the negotiators and too technical for the politicians. It is therefore no surprise that agreement on the post-2012 climate regime was not finalised. Similarly, the way Copenhagen ensured the involvement of heads of state in negotiations was unique not only for multilateral environmental agreements but also for the UN in general. It resulted in an unprecedented process and outcome, the ramifications of which may be felt for years to come.

The world watched the negotiations with hope, but most of us left Copenhagen with more questions than answers. In seeking honest answers to questions about the future of multilateral cooperation we may indeed rediscover some hope and finally respond to the 100,000 people who marched through the streets of Copenhagen unequivocally stating that “there is no planet B”.

Richard Sherman participated in the December, 2009, UN climate summit in Copenhagen as a member of the South African delegation. He was also the political editor of a daily stakeholder newsletter, Outreach Issues. These views are the author’s own and do not represent the views of the South African government, the stakeholder forum or the RCCP.

Slept late. Woke feeling groggy.

Went online. Sunday Independent’s front page top story: “The Hopelesshagen flop”

It’s all over. I survived my first CoP (Conference of the Parties).

And now I feel the gravity of home beginning to reel me in … time to shower, pack and head for the airport.

Copenhagen. Hopenhagen. Hopelesshagen.

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Just quickly. I’m shattered and need to get to bed.

By the end of the day, yesterday, it was clear that we wouldn’t get a legal agreement. We were too close to the midnight deadline set by the United Nations, and countries were still stuck on the main issues of emissions cuts and climate compensation.

A draft of a new document, the “Copenhagen Accord” had been circulating all day—so we knew for sure that we’d see a political agreement come out of the climate summit.

What we didn’t expect was that Barack Obama would call a press conference close to midnight (with only White House press allowed into the room) in which he announced to the world that this agreement had been reached!

He gallops into town at the 11th hour, calls a meeting with 28 people—heads of state (including our prez) and leaders representing the different blocs. They decide to back the Copenhagen Accord. He announces it to the world (so it’s being called the “Obama Accord”!!) before all the 192 country representatives have had a chance to state in plenary whether or not they back the thing.

The cheek of it!

I had to file copy very early this morning, to get into the Sunday papers. By 4am, many of the smaller and more vulnerable countries had rejected the accord out of hand. So I wrapped up my 1 000 word piece stating that the summit was a failure, with the accord being rejected. I filed at 6am and left for our digs to get some sleep.

I slept until 10am, only to wake in time to find the entire political landscape had changed and that the accord had been accepted! I got onto the phone to my editor back in SA to see if there was still time to rework the story to show the very final stages of development.

Thankfully, after the quickest rewrite in history, we managed to get the updated story through in time. It was a harrowing day—one 24-hour shift, three hours of sleep, then final edits and one last news story. Whatever way you read it, though, Hopenhagen became Hopelesshagen this week because the summit was a failure, if you take the science of climate change seriously.

I drifted through the rest of the day in a fog—a combination of losing a sense of time passing (not seen much sunlight during the past fortnight), lack of sleep and the demands of deadlines. But most of all, there was an undercurrent of despair because cheap politicking and White House power mongering hijacked a democratic (if flawed) negotiation process last night.

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

My ed wanted two things out of today: a colour piece to show what the activists and green folk were up to, and a wrap of the conference since it should finish tonight (midnight’s the deadline by when they’re supposed to have signed this thing into law).

I’d heard, from snooping about the NGO hall last night, that a small group of “Climate Pirates” were going to shave their heads in protest against the lack of action during the climate summit. So I dashed out through security to the entrance of the Bella centre, gasped at the big freeze waiting outside, and caught up with protesters.

Definitely the nicest story to write this week. It was a terrific set of interviews—freezing cold, so cold that my pen stopped working, and I had to borrow a pencil from the guy I was interviewing!—but should be in Sunday’s papers. Was so cold by the end of it that I couldn’t write.

Dashed back inside, wrote that up and have spent the rest of the day trying to keep up with all the behind-the-scenes stuff. All the environment ministers and negotiators are still at it in the formal plenary, but sounds like there are a lot of meetings going on behind closed doors between heads of state. That’s where the real deal making happens. But it doesn’t look as though any of the gridlock issues have been resolved (emissions cuts, finance, tech transfer, capacity building, shared common vision – but it’s the first two that are the deal breaker issues).

Only a few hours till the midnight deadline … then we’ll know whether we’ve got a deal or not. Looks like it’s going to be a long one …

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Jorisna Bonthuys (my intrepid colleague from Die Burger) and I made the grave error of deciding to leave an hour later than normal (6:30am) this morning, and got snarled up in a city snowed under and suffering transport failures.

But we did manage to get to the 12-noon briefing with our president at his hotel, which didn’t produce much “new” to write about South Africa and our position here at Copenhagen. But he did confirm that he was going to meet with Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi to talk about Zenawi announcing yesterday that the African Union would halve its demands for climate money from the developed world. Critics say this is Africa selling out, western state heads say it’s the first move to break the deadlock here. Wonder how we’ll judge this decision in decades to come?

Spent most of the day dashing from one venue to the next, trying to catch up with the president but mostly ended up finding he’d deputised his environment minister Buyelwa Sonjica to stand in his stead.

Today was a total dud.

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Unbelievable. It seems that the most exciting thing to happen at Copenhagen so far is the arrival of Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s if you judge popularity by the length of queues … and the queue to get the “first come, first served” tickets to his talk today was several times longer even than the queues to the loos, the coffee bars and the food stalls.

So yes, it seems a lot of people wanted to hear what the good governor had to say.

Suppose he has been head of the world’s sixth largest economy (was it the sixth?) for a while—but then, Forbes magazine also lists him as one of the five possible reasons for that very economy’s collapse during the past year.

Whatever the case, there were more important things to do at the Bella Center in Copenhagen today than queue for the honour of listening to Schwarzenegger’s political rhetoric. The world’s environment ministers have arrived in town and spent the day going over the draft texts that their bureaucrats spent the past week picking over… the same text that was supposed to become the two-tiered legally binding agreement, by midnight this Friday, that is supposed to save us from runaway global warming.

I’ll be bold enough to predict one thing, and hope for another: I don’t believe a legal agreement will happen this Friday. There are too many gridlocks on “non-negotiable issues” this late in play.

Secondly, I hope the current text doesn’t because law because it’s so weak on hard emissions cuts, deforestation efforts, and financial assistance for the “global south” that if we signed it, our kids would really be stuck with uncontrollable climate change.

So everyone’s hoping that ministers—and then state leaders, who arrive on Thursday—will get more ambitious.

I doubt it’ll happen.

But in spite of the gloomy mood hanging over negotiations (as the press room swelled to capacity with the influx of mostly new US media arrivals), it was lovely to walk back home from the station this evening with snowflakes swirling around my head. It was a gentle counterpoint to the otherwise sweltering political and scientific topic of global warming.

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

I’m feeling a little cynical about my profession today. Here’s how today played out: in a press conference scheduled for early today, the Africa group said it wasn’t happy with the way the Danish hosts of the negotiations had set the agenda for the day.

It’s a pretty long and technical explanation for why it was a problem (hopefully Independent Newspapers will run the full story tomorrow, so I can point you to the details) but basically it was an annoying procedural issue that could have resulted in the death of the Kyoto Protocol (the only legally binding mechanism currently governing emission reductions).

South Africa and the Africa group protested to the Danes that they wanted the day’s programme reworked to give greater priority to negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol – but said, expressly, that they had no intentions of walking out of the talks in order to get their way.

So while I was busy tapping out my story in the press room, I got one report from back home saying “Oh my god, the Africa group has walked out of the negotiations in protest”. I fired a quick text message back saying “no, not true”. Another someone sent a similar message. I replied, again: “no, it’s not true, they haven’t walked out!”

But by the time I filed the story, my editor was saying “it’s all over the BBC, Africa’s walked out”.

So I hit the corridors of the climate negotiations to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and, within five minutes, had a reliable source telling me that this is what happened: Africa (like many other developing countries who want to see the Kyoto Protocol live) was unhappy with the way the Danes had scheduled the day’s discussions. That’s all. They expressed their concern with the president of the negotiations, Connie Hedegaard. Then, in acknowledgement of Africa’s objections, Connie agreed to halt talks until the schedule had been readjusted to suit Africa’s (pretty reasonable) objections.

I got onto the phone to my editor in Johannesburg immediately to straighten things out – and reworked the story to reflect what, I hope, was a closer reflection of the truth.

But all over the Western press, the headlines screamed that Africa had walked out of negotiations.

One of my colleagues, a respected and veteran environmental journalist, got so annoyed with the twisted story she was hearing from a bunch of Australian journalists sitting near her in the press room that she went over to have a word. She tried in about four different ways to explain to them that the Africa group had not walked out of negotiations. Alas, they refused to hear her. Because the far more exciting headline was one which read that Africa had walked out.

This reminds me of something we were warned about before the negotiations evens started here in Copenhagen: that it might be in the interests of selling newspapers in the developed world to reflect developing countries as being “disruptive” of proceedings as these negotiations unfold.

Bear in mind that these negotiations are a pretty turgid bureaucratic affair, so it’s hard to wring front page news out of them every day.

I have to say, though, I’m disappointed with my fellow brethren today. Very disappointed indeed. Today’s headline didn’t bleed … so it was twisted until it could lead.

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.