The good…

Today we’ve been busy attending, taking notes and summarising the main plenary sessions for Kiribati.  The talks have been tense and amongst the inhuman UN language there have been tears and anger from the official negotiators.  We witnessed the spokesperson from Tuvalu break down as he spoke in utter desperation to save his culture, community and livelihood.  The future of his whole country is in the hands of a few.

Watching the Alliance of Small Island States hold their press conference last night, we could feel the exhaustion in their words… the dark lines under their eyes showed how stretched the small delegations are.  They have to negotiate and hold press conferences whilst larger delegations have individuals who do nothing but rest and deliver speeches.

The bad…

The wonderful Bella Center, the host of the COP15 conference, only has a capacity of 15,000. The Secretariat, the people who keep the conference ticking over, are putting into place what’s called ‘double-badging’.  This means that as of Tuesday, we might not be allowed in anymore. So Kiribati’s already tiny team will be reduced even further.

Sound like fair play? Not really.

As of this week, only a limited number of NGO people (like us at UN Fair Play) will be allowed in. So even though we’re doing important work for a vulnrable, underrepresented country we might be left hanging around outside unable to do anything. We won’t be able attend meetings for them, take notes or summarise documents.

It’s doubly frustrating because lots of people we’ve met here aren’t even doing very much. We’ve started calling them “grazers”

They just wander around “grazing”, popping in, popping out, collecting stickers and papers and aren’t really interested in any of the negotiations… they seem to think of COP as a festival rather than the official negotiations of the most important meeting ever to exist.  So we’re angry at being bumped off the list when there are people in the conference who don’t really need to be here.

It doesn’t help our situation but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s good to moan. We’re trying hard to get round this situation.  We’ll keep you posted.

[Blog taken from http://unfairplay.info/]

Tags: AOSIS, climate change, COP15, double badging, environment, Hopenhagen, islands, Kiribati, LDC's, NGO, NGOs, pacific islands, Politics, samll island states, sea level rise, SIDS, UN, UN climate negotiations, un fair play, unfair play, UNFCCC, youth

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under A Day in the Life Of..., Environmental Issues, In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.