Blogs: In Hot Water

Even though the climate is already changing, the best that the governments could do in Poznan during the UN Climate Change Conference is come up with a schedule of negotiations leading up to the next ministerial meeting in Copenhagen next December. There a deal for post-2012 should be signed.

Banner at Protest Against AES (Dawn Jones)

Even though local communities in vulnerable areas of the planet such as Tuvalu or Bangladesh are already feeling the impacts of climate change, one rarely hears talk of their situation during the plenary sessions of the UN Climate Change Conference. In honor of Human Rights Day, which was yesterday, let's take a closer look at human rights in the context of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Cop 14 in Poznan, Poland

I have just come from a meeting of the NGOs working on the CDM, as well as the big Climate Action Network daily meeting. The mood is bad, real bad. First on the CDM: as Payal reported earlier, all issues pertaining to the future of the CDM, where the real potential for a fundamental restructuring of the mechanism lies, have been postponed to next year. And for the current CDM, up to 2012, only governance issues were on the table. But still, changes on those governance issues would have made a difference. To have the validators (the DOEs in CDMtalk) be selected and paid for by the UNFCCC Secretariat, and not by the project developers themselves, would have been a good step in the right direction. We also pushed for a stronger role of the Secretariat in all project decisions, so that a professional, independent, full-time body would make the difficult decisions on the additionality and the environmental integrity of potential CDM projects.

What are the delegates saying about the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) at the UN Climate Change Conference? Well, we don't really know what's on the table post-2012 because the discussion has been postponed to the next intersessional meeting in Bonn in March. But working papers that were released earlier this year contain a host of suggestions ranging from increasing the types of projects that could be eligible for credits (scary things like nuclear and carbon capture and storage) and shifting away from proving additionality on a project by project basis to sectoral approaches. These are all proposals aimed at increasing the scope of the CDM.

Lots of hot air

Reuters has compiled a helpful cheatsheet on country-by-country climate targets (see below). Reminding ourselves (and our leaders) of these targets now would be a good idea, considering that the attitude in Poznan has apparently turned pessimistic - see Ambitions for 2009 UN climate pact fade in Poznan (Reuters). (Oh, by the way, Venice just experienced its highest flood levels in 22 years.)

Start Helping (Ann-Kathrin Schneider)

Here at Poznan, the Clean Development Mechanism, CDM, is being taken apart. Sounds like good news you say? Well... It is taken apart in the sense that the reforms to the current CDM are being discussed here in Poznan, and the future of the CDM, post 2012, will only be discussed next year. This means that for now, we have to do with incremental changes to the governing structure of the mechanism, but bigger changes to the fundamental principles of the CDM have to wait until next year. Which gives us room for campaigning and hope, I guess.

No More Dams!

On Friday, International Rivers was asked to speak at a side event at the UN Climate Change Conference titled "False Solutions to Climate Change".  I presented data showing that tropical reservoirs are often high emitters of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Reservoirs produce methane due to the rotting of organic matter under low-oxygen conditions.  In certain cases these emissions can even be worse than a coal fired power plant.  Our newest factsheet, Dirty Hydro provides more details.

Change Needed (Ann-Kathrin Schneider)

This Icebear is greeting the participants of the Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland. He is sooo right!!!

Stop Harming (Ann-Kathrin Schneider)

24 hours at the Climate Conference in Poznan – and I am still struggling to make the shift between the real world and the world of acronyms. Back home in Berlin, I saw the climate conference in big picture terms: commitments to fight climate change, yes or no? But here, even after just 24 hours on the ground, I am immersed in the technical language, the nitty-gritty details, already climate-acronym-literate. CDM, shared vision, negotiating mandate, mitigation – developed, mitigation – developing, adaptation, finance, tech transfer, LULUFC and last but not least REDD are all no longer strangers to me.

Pelamis Wave Energy Converter at Agucadoura, Portugal (S. Portland / flickr.com)

Renewable energy blogger Unergy has a recent diary posting on Daily Kos with a list of 20 emerging ocean hydropower technologies.

Presumably many of these technologies will never emerge from the prototype stage, but given the clean energy imperative it's likely some of these inventions - or something similar - will become common features of our coastlines in the future.