Protecting the environment with intelligence
As I write this, COP17, the international climate conference which began two weeks ago under a big storm cloud and torrential flooding, is about to enter the home stretch. The sense of surrealism I mentioned in an earlier post reached its apex today. Just to the right of the bench I’m on, an amateur pianist [...]
Durban was hot and steamy yesterday – it’s getting on for high summer in the Southern Hemisphere – and I spent the best part of the afternoon in a glorified prefab (aka the “EU Pavilion”). COP17 has been mercifully light on air conditioning, a huge relief after the two weeks spent shivering in Cancún last [...]
Last Sunday night, flash floods killed eight people in and around the city of Durban and left thousands homeless. Just one in a series of recent extreme weather events here in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province, it probably wouldn’t have crossed most people’s radar screen were it not for the fact that thousands of foreign delegates [...]
As a campaigner working on climate change policy, it’s easy to get lost in a world of abstract figures. A few million tonnes of carbon here, a billion dollars there – it can all seem very academic and unreal. At the other extreme, there are those stories that bring you back to earth with a [...]
It might have escaped most people’s attention that today, September 16, is World Ozone Day. Or, to put it more long-windedly, the ‘International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer’. However, it probably won’t have escaped attention that the hole in the ozone layer, the cause of global consternation in the 1970s and ’80s, [...]
It’s the last day of the OEWG and time to take a step back and see what we’ve achieved.