Blogs

Peter at the Berne Declaration

One of my favorite movies is The Big Lebowski. In this film by the Coen brothers, Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski gets into serious trouble because some mobsters confuse him with a namesake. Little did I suspect that I would one day face namesake troubles of my own.

Dead fish in the Madeira River (AGÊNCIA AMAZÔNIA)

In 2007, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva famously announced that "environmentalists are trying to dump some catfish on my lap" by opposing dams on the Amazon's Madeira River. The quip came after scientists released studies documenting the serious impacts that the dams would have on catfish and other migratory species on the Madeira River. Well, over the past few weeks, dead catfish are just one of the many problems that have been plaguing the Santo Antonio and Jirau Dams.

Leadership consultant, non-profit governance guru, artiste and evil genius Andre Carothers, just sent me this old song of his he found while doing an end-of-year dunging out of his hard drive. Andre performed this song at an International Rivers Network fundraising dinner in San Francisco in 2002. We were so ashamed that we decided (after five years' deliberation) to change our name. We also stopped talking to Andre until recently when he took advantage of our Blagojevich fundraising scam and bought himself the seat of vice chair on our board (note to IRS and FBI - that was a joke).

You have to hand it to the European governments. They really try to avoid open conflicts with their friends. Even as it becomes clear that Turkey will not fulfill the social and environmental conditions under which it accepted export credits for the Ilisu Dam from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the funders are looking for an exit strategy which allows all parties to save face. Yet the Turkish authorities do not seem to be interested in a diplomatic solution. They have started a campaign of repression and expropriation against the affected communities. If the conflict over Ilisu continues at this pace, the funders may soon be beyond face-saving.

That and sanitation (water supply's poor cousin for infrastructure and aid).

Clearly climate change will continue to dominate the news. But my prediction for the new year (and those to follow) is that we'll be seeing a lot more water issues on the (web)page. International Rivers has covered water supply in the Himalayas, followed the water politics between nations like India and Pakistan, and tracked emergent water storage solutions (such as rainwater harvesting). News agencies worldwide are also picking up the stories as well, especially on how water relates to climate change, health, and international politics.

We live in times of unprecedented economic and environmental crisis, and historic opportunity. A Green New Deal can rebalance our economy and address the looming environmental collapse at the same time. An editorial in the latest issue of World Rivers Review, our flagship publication, presents a few concrete suggestions.

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).

The ancient town of Hasankeyf would be flooded by the Ilisu Dam (peevishsoul)

The Austrian foreign minister just announced that his country will pull out of the Ilisu Dam in Turkey. Even though the foreign minister is not in charge of his country’s export credit agency, this most likely spells the end of the European funding for the ill-fated project. The Austrian, German and Swiss export credit agencies will meet in Vienna tomorrow to coordinate their positions. If they follow through on the minister’s announcement, it will be the first time export credit agencies are abandoning a destructive dam project for social and environmental reasons. We hope the Ilisu experience will cause international dam financiers to be more cautious in the future. At the same time, we will try to ensure that other funders do not take up the tab.

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.