UK-India conversation on climate change

0

Friday was a busy day for the British Government on climate change. With 161 days to go until the UN climate conference in Copenhagen lots of the Government's big guns were in action. Firstly, PM Gordon Brown gave a major speech in which he set out how much money should be provided to cut greenhouse gas emissions and help vulnerable countries adapt to its unavoidable impacts: around $100 billion per year by 2020. He also set out key principles to determine how that climate finance should be raised and spent:

• Contribution to and allocation of climate finance should be equitable
• Funds should be additional to the money the UK and other countries have already committed for overseas development assistance and to meet the Millennium Development Goals
• The sources of funding should be predictable, to allow long-term investment
• And there should be shared governance arrangements....
  
  
  Friday , June 26, 2009

  The Business of Climate Change

  
  

  0

  Climate change negotiations are a frustrating business. The first time I went to a Conference of Parties (or COP - the big end-of year negotiations which Ministers attend and will this year be held in Copenhagen) was COP-12 in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2006. I joined the thousands of delegates from almost every country in the world and many thousands more observers from non-governmental organisations or media on the UN compound there. It's a big compound in Nairobi but not big enough to house all the participants, so they had erected lots of tents on grassy areas too (grass that turned increasingly to mud with all those people around), and there were cafes set up to feed and water us all. When I arrived I felt as if my closest life experience to date had been attending the big British rock festival in Glastonbury as a student. When I....

  
  
  Monday , June 22, 2009

  The Writing's on the Wall

  
  

  0

  If you've walked or driven past the British High Commission or Ashok Hotel in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi recently, you might have noticed 600 feet of graffiti down our wall. If you couldn't quite believe your eyes and decided you should double back for a second look you might have noticed it wasn't graffiti at all, but a mural about climate change - those of you more observant than I am, might not have needed that second look. The wall depicts two alternative futures for India. On one side, a future of dangerous climate change, in which the average global temperature has risen by four degrees or more by the end of this century. A future in which floods and droughts, desertification and crop loss, displacement of people and loss of biodiversity have all increased. The other side of the wall represents a world in which the global....

  
  
  Tuesday , June 16, 2009

  Joining the Dots

  
  

  1

  Understanding how climate change is changing our lives is often a matter of joining the dots. On Friday I met an interesting group of climate change activists from the Climate Action Network - people from a number of organisations working from the international level to the grassroots. Suman Dasgupta from 'Wada Na Todo Abhiyan' [http://www.wadanatodo.net/] told me about a fascinating initiative - the All India People's Manifesto - which had developed a 10-point development charter for over 300 parliamentary constituencies in the run-up to the general election. Suman said that climate change had been mentioned in only a handful of these constituencies as a development priority. I'm not surprised. Climate change is too often considered as a purely 'environmental' challenge or the subject of endless inconclusive international negotiations - not as something with fundamental implications for India's development. But look through the list of what the aam....

  
  
  Thursday , June 11, 2009

  UK-India conversation on climate change

  
  

  3

  Hello and welcome to my new blog. A friend and regular blogger for CNN-IBN invited me to be a guest on the site. I confess to being a little nervous - it's my first time. But communicating is a big part of my job as a diplomat, so I'm keen to give it a go. And there's clearly no better time to start - given the inspiration of Shashi Tharoor's twittering. I wanted to start a blog to help broaden the UK-India conversation about climate change. It's just under six months until the global community comes together in Copenhagen to agree a new global framework to tackle climate change, in December 2009. So I'll be living and breathing the negotiations until then - and giving my take on what they might mean for India and for the UK. I have a great job that allows me to....