Tag Archives: United Nations

Mongabay: ‘Standing with your feet in the water’: COP26 struggles to succeed

With Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg leading protests both Friday and Saturday (Nov. 5-6, 2021) through the streets of central Glasgow, tens of thousands of people, mostly young people from around the world, mocked the proceedings of COP26, demanded “real” leadership, and didn’t let up even in driving wind and rain. The protests continued every day of the summit.

On Friday, November 12, I decided to take the morning off from COP26 to see a bit of Glasgow — the immense 12th-Glasgow Cathredral that reformationist John Knox changed from Catholic to Protestant, and the campus of the University of Glasgow, which I heard was the setting for Harry Potter movies. It wasn’t, but it could’ve been.

My goal on the last afternoon of official negotiations was to simply attend press conferences, track the shifting language in the latest draft of the Glasgow accords and Paris Agreement rulebook, and prepare for the climate summit wrap up I would write once I returned home to the U.S. I had no plans to write this story.

But sometimes luck intervenes and directs you to a front row seat to history. After getting into the venue, I noticed a line of people filing into the main plenary hall, called Cairn Gorm. It wasn’t long before I realized that this could be, in borrowing from Hamilton, ‘the room where it happened.’ When U.S. climate envoy John Kerry walked right in front of me on his way to his seat, and I then heard COP26 President Alok Sharma of Great Britain call the hastily called meeting of 196 nations “our collective moment in history,” I knew I had one last story to write from Glasgow.

The tension, the emotions, the high-stakes pressure, the frustration, the recognition of a race against time in rescuing the planet from the worst ravages of human-caused climate change infused grand, furious and pleading messages by delegates from every nation. What a story.

EU lead negotiator Frans Timmermans showed the assemblage a photo of his 1-year-old grandson during his comments. Together, he said, the leaders at COP26 could assure Chase’s healthy future or assure a time when he “would be in a fight with other human beings for food and water.” The plenary erupted in applause as he thundered: “This is personal! This is not political.”

Mongabay: Land rights, forests, food systems central to limiting global warming: report

This gigantic mahogany is Cocha Cashu is a rich target for illegal timbering. If were to fall and be burned, it would release tons of sequestered CO2 and no longer provide the ecosystem service of absorbing air pollution. (That’s me in the background.) Photo by Jason Houston

On Oct. 8, 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC)  raised a bright red flag of warning for world leaders. In essence, the 91 climate scientists from 40 nations decried in a major report the lack of action on climate mitigation internationally. It made clear that time is running out. They warned that irreversible climate damage could lock in as early as 2040, not decades later, as previously hoped.

This story of mine, posted one week later, is largely in response to the IPCC report and is based on the research stemming from another group of climate scientists and advocates with the acronym CLARA — Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance.

As one source told me: “Our study is not meant to either contradict or complement the IPCC report,” said Doreen Stabinsky, a co-author of Missing Pathways. “The IPCC looks very generally at pathways to 1.5 degrees C. We dive into the literature to find what would be useful, specific contributions from the land sector to stay within a 1.5-degree pathway.” 

Interesting context. Mongabay special editor Willie Shubert emailed me Thursday morning, Oct. 11, to ask if I could turn a story around quickly on the CLARA study and have it ready to post by Monday, Oct. 15. I agreed. I put calls out early Thursday afternoon and arranged for three telephone interviews on Friday. I knew Hurricane Michael, a climate-change-fueled monster, had made landfall in northern Florida at 155 mph a day earlier; I didn’t realize it was heading to central North Carolina. By Thursday afternoon, winds in Greensboro hit 50 mph as Michael swept through. Trees fell all over the Triad. Power and Internet went out in my neighborhood and around the region around 3:30 pm Thursday. It would not be restored until Sunday afternoon.

A sincere thanks to HQ Greensboro, the co-working space in downtown Greensboro, which never lost power or Internet service. I spent all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday there, doing my reporting, conducting my interviews, grading my Wake Forest assignments, and finally, writing the story linked here. My editor, Glenn Scherer, liked the irony that I was writing about climate mitigation while being directly affected by a climate-influenced event.