Climate change's super September gives way to an awkward October
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Apologies that it has been many weeks since I've written - it's not because I have been sitting idle! September was the busiest month working on climate change and energy issues in my year and a half in India. Internationally, we had UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon convening his High Level Meeting in New York, bringing together over a hundred Heads of State, including my Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to talk climate change. We had the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh where leaders discussed climate finance along with other top tier economic issues. We had key Ministers and lead negotiators from around the world meeting for the Greenland Dialogue and Major Economies Forum in the middle of the month. And official level delegations came together in Bangkok for the latest round of UN negotiations 28 September - 9 October. So the pace is certainly picking up as Copenhagen approaches. The....
Climate insecurity: threat multiplier or bridge-builder?
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To the Institute of Defence and Strategic Analysis (IDSA) in New Delhi over the weekend for a fascinating panel discussion with some of India's climate change A team, including Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and Prime Minister's Special Envoy Shyam Saran for the government, Nitin Desai, Ligia Norona and Arvind Gupta from influential think-tanks The Energy Resource Institute (TERI) and IDSA. The occasion was the launch of a working group report on the security implications of climate change for India. This is a subject of increasing concern for Western security thinkers too. The concern is not that climate change will lead to war in itself, but that it will act as a "threat multiplier", increasing the risk of conflict and reducing human security. It's not difficult to envision how this might play out in South Asia. Take the obvious example of water: it's an increasingly scarce resource for India and....
Climate Negotiations
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In the climate negotiations two unhelpful attitudes are all too common: us and them, and after you. 17 years ago, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a world which codified "us" and "them", "Annex 1" and "non-Annex 1", "the developed world" and "the developing world". In 2009, a world of such binary opposites is even less real than it was in 1992. Especially when the "developing world" includes South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, along with Tuvalu, Lesotho and Nepal. Unless the international community can find some way to break down this binary, sooner rather than later, our collective response to the climate challenge will be too slow and too weak. As long as this unhelpful binary exists, it reinforces an "after you" dynamic in the negotiations, or "I won't show you mine until you show me yours". All countries are guilty of this....
UK-India conversation on climate change
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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, 2009The Business of Climate Change
0 Tweet 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, 2009The Writing's on the Wall
0 Tweet 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, 2009Joining the Dots
1 Tweet 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, 2009UK-India conversation on climate change
3 Tweet 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....
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