Ann-Kathrin Schneider's blog

Erkud,Tarkan &Güven in Berlin in May 2009 - Fighting the Ilisu Dam in Turkey

Today in Berlin, its all about Tarkan and Merkel. Tarkan, the biggest Turkish popstar is in town, and he is the talk of town. He is here to convince the German government to withdraw support from the controversial Ilisu Dam, which the Turkish government plans to build on the Tigris River in the Southeast of the country, with the help of German, Swiss and Austrian money. The Berliner Zeitung, one of the biggest German dailys, today spread the rumour that Tarkan was to meet with German chancelor Merkel to convince her to withdraw support for the project.

Back home in Berlin, I am overwhelmed by the show of support for our message that dams are a risky business. In India alone, one hundred activists and organizations signed a petition denouncing our deportation from the World Water Forum and thanking International Rivers for saying no
to risky dams.

Xiaoxi Dam, Hunan Province, China (Tina Lea)

The international media is increasingly echoing our criticism of the Clean Development Mechanism's phony offsets. The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Huffington Post and Germany's Focus Online were among the many outlets that carried an Associated Press story this week about credits from bad hydro projects in China being bought by German utility RWE, one of the largest polluters in Europe. The credits allow RWE to meet their commitments under the EU's carbon trading scheme while opening new carbon-spewing coal plants.

I recently met with the German DNA - a department of the German environment ministry that is responsible for all things related to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism - to further discuss whether Xiaoxi, remember, the Chinese dam that has displaced 7,500 people, was indeed environmentally and socially benign and should therefore be allowed to sell carbon credits to German companies. The German DNA approved the project last year, based on an assessment by German company Tüv Süd.

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.

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.

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.

Are we living in two different universes? I am talking about the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, and myself. Just yesterday, he congratulated himself for the fact that Germany had already registered 112 Clean Development Mechanism projects and was therefore number four of the world's CDM registering countries.