WILD

The Aftermath

Since the dismal conclusion of the Copenhagen talks, experts following the UN climate change negotiations have been trying to sort out whether the Copenhagen Accord was a step forward or not. Some have begun calling it the Copenhagen Discord. Some have taken a gentler view, saying that even if it is not the solution, at least it helps build consensus. Reading the tea leaves on the issue of forests and wilderness is similarly difficult. Read More

And then there were three

The Copenhagen Climate talks were supposed to be the place where the global community finally achieved broad consensus, providing at the very least a political way forward that everyone could rally behind. Conservationists hoped that this new consensus would include strong and unambiguous recognition of the role of nature and wilderness in climate change. I attended the Copenhagen Climate meeting with this message – in the form of the Message from Merida launched at WILD9, the World Wilderness Congress in Mexico one month earlier. The Message from Merida was signed by over 70 NGOs representing many of the largest conservation ... Read More

After Copenhagen – Suspended Animation

Fortunately, none of the 120 or so heads of state in Copenhagen pretended that the climate talks in Copenhagen (the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or “COP 15”) were a big success. Any attempt to greenwash these talks would have been a) insulting and b) a clear signal that the political will for a comprehensive, legally binding climate agreement had truly and completely evaporated. Read More

The Politicians Take the Stage in Copenhagen

One day remains in the UN’s climate talks in Copenhagen. Negotiators have been working around the clock in a desperate race against time to resolve outstanding issues and rise above the many controversies that have wracked these talks. From the secret Danish proposal, which to the dismay and anger of developing countries has continued to hover in the background of the negotiations, to the sometimes violent demonstrations outside the Bella center, to the eviction of NGOs from the negotiating process – a disgrace, all the more so in the country where the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation ... Read More

Report from Copenhagen: Tuvalu & Wilderness

Delegates arrived at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen expecting talks to focus around a few key players. In particular, expectations were that China and the United States, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases around the world, would be in the spotlight. These two large and powerful countries, neither of which are currently bound by any emissions reductions commitments, and both of which must be part of a new agreement if we have any hope of avoiding dangerous climate change, were being watched very closely by all present. And then, Tuvalu stole the spotlight. Read More

When it comes to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the U.S. stands with…Somalia and Andorra? Maybe it’s time we join the 192 other countries.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the flagship international convention for protecting, wilderness and the diversity of life on this planet. It's the only international mechanism that addresses biodiversity writ large (as opposed to treaties focusing on individual species, or individual biomes such as wetlands) and it's also the only treaty that focuses on establishing a comprehensive global network of protected areas, including wilderness protected areas. The CBD is the key mechanism for promoting international cooperation on protecting nature. It's also a treaty in desperate need of an injection of energy and enthusiasm. The global community is about to miss ... Read More

Offsets, Climate Change & Wilderness

A recent review of the UK's strategy to reduce carbon emissions in a blog by George Monbiot in the Guardian used back of the envelope calculations to show that the UK's emissions reductions plan relied heavily on offsets in poor countries to reach its targets, with the very perverse result that under the UK plan, poor countries would in fact be expected to reduce their domestic emissions more than the UK. This would of course be an absurd outcome, even if the UK were paying for those emissions reductions, and in any case unacceptable to developing nations around ... Read More

100 Days over 100 Degrees

The White House recently released an interagency report detailing potential climate impacts in the United States. The "plain language" report entitled "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States" includes data up to December 2008 and is therefore more up to date than the Fourth Assessment Report compiled by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The key conclusion of the report is that human induced climate change is already impacting the United States, and that our early actions today are critical to reduce the severity of the changes we will experience in the future. The longer we wait, the ... Read More

Climate Change – We Can’t Solve the Problem without Forests

Negotiations on a new climate change agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol (it expires in 2012) will reach a critical milestone this December in Copenhagen at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The objective for the Copenhagen meeting is to reach agreement on a framework for a post-Kyoto agreement by the end of the conference. There will be many details that will remain unresolved until after Copenhagen - but the idea is that the core architecture of the agreement, including the all-important question of emissions reductions targets, will be ... Read More

REDD+: Conservation’s Role in the Fight Against Climate Change

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing is moving towards including tropical forest conservation in addition to sustainable forestry practices in its Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation mechanism. Including conservation in REDD - making REDD into REDD+ - draws attention to the huge potential of carbon sequestration through wilderness protection. Wild nature and wilderness areas - on land and sea - are critically important from a climate change perspective: they keep large amounts of carbon locked up, they absorb carbon out of the atmosphere, and they help ... Read More