COP 18: What its like...

The bus drove up to the convention center yesterday, and we parked in a dirt parking lot next to the main garage for the convention center. They have you enter the parking garage, which is a building that looks as if giant white vines are creeping up the side. Once in the garage, they have you enter a hallway and you take an escalator down to a security station. A standard security procedure is conducted. You walk passed the registration booths, and get your ID scanned at which point you are allowed to make the journey to the convention center under ground. It is about a tenth of a mile to the actual convention center, and you take escalators up to the main level.

            Taking the escalators up for the first time was overwhelming. I stepped off of the escalator and was at the end of a magnificent building. The main concourse is enormous, and monstrous sculpted tree limbs leap out of the ground to hold the ceiling in place, which is about four stories above my head. Art and monitors scatter the conference center as you follow the pack of people to the main foyer. The foyer has huge banners in a deep calming blue reading “7 billion people, 1 challenge, count me in,” a rhetoric I do not think many embrace. In the center is a two story iron sculpture of a spider. People weave in and out of its legs and gasp in awe of the unique art display. Through glass pane doors you enter a room with a pond like setting. A rainbow lighted pan of water spans a large area of the room and above skylights illuminate the room and hanging from the skylight are giant green leaf shaped molds. The building spans acres and acres of land.

            Delegates and negotiators swarm around you as you are trying to take everything in. Dozens of different languages are being spoken around you at all points of time. Media are stalking the outside of groups waiting for the right moment to take a picture, and you feel lost in a sea of noise. It was incredibly overwhelming and a little concerning because I did not even think I was going to be able to find the sessions in a building this large let alone understand what was going on. To tell you the truth for all of the first day and part of today this continued to be a problem.

            The whole first day I sat, listened, and followed veterans around the conference just trying to get a grasp of what was going on around me. There are so many interest groups, policy discussions, open and closed meetings, press conferences, and educational sessions that it is no wonder to me that not much is produced in these two weeks of meetings. I am a newbie though so all this confusion is not really a problem for those that have been at this for awhile so do not take that last comment too seriously. Information washed over me all day, and I know I learned a lot, but by the end of the day I was not really sure what I had accomplished. To be honest it was not a whole lot, but by today, the second day, I actually started developing strategies, asking the right questions and getting into the grove of things. I am a kind of sink or swim person, and I always want to be Michael Phelps and nothing less. We do not meet with our delegates until later in the week so I have some time to collect my thoughts and really get to understand what is happening hopefully. I know I will not get everything, or be anywhere close to knowing everything in these next two weeks, I am not sure I will even have all the acronyms down for different programs by then, but it is a work in progress..

            So that is how I am feeling and what is sticking out to me right now. A lot of this is emotional reactions to the situation. As I go through the negotiations I am sure it will develop into refection of the content of the negotiations more. I realized though that I have not described why I am here, how I was chosen and what I am doing here really though.

            I was chosen as a representative of the Sierra Club through the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC). I applied for the position in January and was notified in March that I was chosen as one of the 14 youth representatives for the Sierra Club. Upon receiving the position I was designated with the role of Sierra Club liaison, and I was to update the Sierra Club with what strategies, messaging and initiatives that the SSC was going to be working on. While at the conference my role has changed slightly. I am working as a youth delegate in an NGO to lobby delegates, specifically the US delegate into supporting climate policy more, enhancing funding, and to participating in more programs to combat climate change. In addition to this, the delegation I am working in is really working on engaging people at home via the Rapid Response Network and media outlets.

            I am personally working on two other initiatives. One is the Part of the Solution Campaign, which is essentially positively showing how countries, people, and corporations are all part of the solution, and then challenging them to do more. I am also working on the forest issues, although that has been more of a bumpy road because we are all new on the committee.

            A couple really cool things have happened here that I quickly want to highlight given I have been behind in blogging due to the fact that I have been working on homework. 1) I was able to go to a talk with Johnathan Pershing, one of the US lead delegates 2) I might get to train young people in Europe and other places about environmental campaigning and organizing 3) I was able to see the Deputy Prime Minister of Qatar Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah in a room with about 50 other youth. Ok I think that is all. 

Last Day of COY

A cool link for the politics of climate change

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2012/11/20121118131411899744.html

            Today I am sad to say was the last day of the Conference of the Youth. It was once again a fantastic day. I unfortunately had to miss the second day because I was sick, and I did nothing but sleep in the hotel room. However, today I woke up early, took a shower, and wrote a good chunk of my paper before I headed off to COY with Adriana and Ian. We took the bus to the convention center to get accredited for the Conference of the Parties, which starts tomorrow, Monday. It was a relatively quick process and we received fancy badges, officially allowing us into the convention center.

            After receiving our badges we trekked to the student center of the Qatar Foundation. It was a bit hot outside, which I thought I escaped once I left Arizona, not so. We made it to the student center, and then waited until the conference started. The rest of the delegation was figuring out hotel stuff because there was some confusion with the rooms. I worked on my homework and relaxed for awhile. Eventually a session started that went a little bit more into the structure of COP and the role that we would be playing in all of it. I was able to meet a few more people through this activity and was able to grasp what is going to happen a bit more.

            Once that activity was complete I met a new person, and he and I talked for about 45 minutes. He is a 19 year old from Sudan. He showed me his blog, and told me amazing things about his country. All I know about Sudan is the limited information I get from the American media about Darfur, and it does not cover anything. The student I was talking to is really passionate about his country and excited about the potential it has especially if the leader is replaced. He also described the process and what occurred when South Sudan and Sudan split last year. It is a little messy there, but in the village or town where he lives he feels relatively safe and gets to watch the stars as he goes to sleep at night. He was also incredibly knowledgeable about US politics and goings on, which astounded me because he was more knowledgeable then most US citizens. It was great being able to talk to him.

            I then was able to sit in the Climate Action Network strategizing session for awhile. It was interesting to see all the NGO perspectives from different countries, and what kind of issues they wanted to put forward or strike down based on their backgrounds. The conversation started to die down to a point where I could leave to find a working group to join in YOUNGO. I looked around the room at all the working groups I could join. There were some about finance, communication, human rights, gender and women, youth action, and things of that sort, but the group that stood out to me the most was the Forests and Agriculture Group. I have always been fascinated by forests and surrounded by them. I played in the forests as a child, went to forestry camp as a teenager, and was quizzed on forest knowledge as a high school student in Envirothon.

            I walked over to the group and it was composed of a very interesting collection of men. The facilitator was a tall New Zealand man, and the other 4 people included a man from Turkey, a man from Liberia, a man from Germany, and finally a man from my delegation from Puerto Rico. We had a very long conversation about forests and what needs to be done by the UN in order to protect them. This included the prevention of slash and burn methods, enabling communities in using forests effectively and framing the issue in such a way that shows the real impact to humans and their livelihoods. It was a great conversation, and it is obvious that I need to learn quite a bit more in order to really understand how to approach the problems. I am really excited to be able to work on this issue because of my background with them.

            We wrapped up the night with a couple speeches from delegates and youth leaders. After that we had an adventurous taxi ride back to the hotel, and then we came up to the hotel room to meet the rest of the delegation that had arrived today. I am really excited for tomorrow when the COP starts, and the delegates fill the convention center halls. 

Conference of the Youth

Today was the first day for the Conference of the Youth (COY) 8. For eight years youth from all over the world come together to strategize about what they are going to do for the next two weeks at the Conference of the Parties. Youth have a particularly important role in climate negotiations. They have more support rallied around them with media, and in general national delegates tend to pay attention to them because of their ability to create action around them. This power that youth have is pretty impressive, and I am quickly realizing what can be done with this to change the way people around the globe think about issues. 

            We started off the day with a quest for cell phones and money (Riyals), but we ended up getting on a bus with the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM) to go to the convention center, which we were not anticipating. We ended up at the convention center and it was pretty far away from everything, so that was fun. We followed the AYCM to a place where a bus picked us up to go to the Qatari Foundation. The building was magnificent, and the architecture was beautiful. There is a huge food court with art surrounding all of it. Then there was a corridor that entered into a garden. The garden has rocks and water symmetrically surrounding a white tower. The tower has white looking branches creeping up it. The surrounding to that garden, aside from the doors, also had the walls and windows with white branch mazes encircling it. Granit slabs line the hallways with huge sitting areas, and this creates a pretty remarkable and welcoming atmosphere. The venue/university for this conference is amazing.

            After exploring the building for a couple hours, because we were stuck in it since we were in the middle of no where (at least not in walking distance from anywhere), youth began to come into the conference area. We met a group from the UK and SustainUS. They were super friendly and even though we had never met we had great conversations. Jessica, Jahdiel and I shared a Papa John’s pizza, which was entertaining considering that Papa Johns is everywhere on my campus.

            We entered the COY for the first session and it was very relaxed and open I was really excited. They started off with an Anti Oppression training. They asked us to stand for concepts that we identified with. It was interesting to see how many people related to items that I did not think really crossed boundaries as much, or that I do not acknowledge that they did. People from the UK, US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and many other places were standing to acknowledge things that really do cross cultures, which lead to oppression. It was a really great exercise, and I felt was a great opening into the space of COY.

            We then did a ice breaker. The facilitators put Gangam Style on and we walked around, and once the music stopped we had to introduce ourselves and tell the other about an interesting fact. I cannot believe they played Gangam Style. I thought I left that at the UA ;-). I met two people from Germany, one from Greece, one from the UK, one from Taiwan, one from the Philippines and a couple others. Doing that activity, it immediately hit me how diverse, and how many stories each of these people have.  I am actually impressed at how many different people were here.

            After a short break we got to hear from the AYCM. This was really cool. In a few months several Arab countries had youth that stepped up to do some sort of day of action to get decision makers attention. Their demonstrations are small but it is a huge step for the Arab countries. I did not realize it until a cab ride that I had with two Bahrain women later, and they really broke down the realities which they are dealing with.

            I was incredibly tired after that and so I do not actually know what happened. I ended up laying down on a really uncomfortable wooden bench and sleeping for about an hour. We then listened to a video that Bill McKibben made, which was not all that positive, but was a nice jester I suppose. He does not see the UN as the venue to go through anymore because nothing is getting done, which I can acknowledge is essentially true. However, I think there needs to be a multipronged approach, and giving up on the UN will not get us anywhere either. I think that there needs to be action on multiple levels to build the capacity that is needed to alter the power and to get countries to act on climate change. Actions need to be made in the countries and on local levels to show that citizens are concerned and demand change, it still needs to happen at the UN to hold them accountable, and then finally I think building huge coalitions internationally can make a huge difference. Climate change issues are in no way going to be easy to deal with for any country, but it is about more then that too. By developing cleaner technologies the health of people improves, by having a fundamental appreciation of the environment areas of the glove will at least be conserved if not preserved, and if done correctly it is not a limiting factor to economic movement. Without the outrageous subsidies and gifts that the oil and coal companies get they would pretty much not be able to function because it would be too expensive to operate effectively. Prices would be too high to the individual consumer at that point. So I think there is opportunity for governments and people to make the right choice. Who wants their economy to hinge on one industry anyway? Diversity is important in any situation so that one is not dependent on another entity for its survival.

            Finally came the cab ride, which was probably the highlight of my day. The two women, Heather, and I shared a cab for the hotel ride home, which is about 30 minutes away from the hotel. I hear about the issues in the Arab world all the time from the media, and it has honestly become background noise because I hear about it all the time, but talking to people who live and breathe the problems is pretty remarkable. In Bahrain there are many environmental problems, and most of the population lives on the north side of the island while the government ravishes the rest. It is also a oil producing country. The women we were talking to have been working to get climate change in their regional planning scheme. They were expressing the difficulties with this because there is so much conflict it is hard for people to care. They do not even know if they will be living in the same place for the next several years so caring about the environment is a luxury. Everything is very uncertain, and it is hard to care about climate change when you are concerned about safety. The desire for democracy has made everything worse too because they do not really know what it looks like or should be. Trying to get people to pay attention to the environment is hard, and it gets worse when the economy thrives on destroying it. This was very eye-opening and it put things into perspective for me. I have never thought about losing my house or life due to war or conflict, and odds are I will never had to. I am amazed at these women and what they are doing despite the incredible difficulties they have to face daily. I am really excited to see what the rest of the week will bring. 

COP 18 Doha Day One

            This was my first Thanksgiving away from the states. It was definitely not filled with Turkey, the Macy’s day parade, or warm stove fires, but it was memorable for the 4 hours that I was not on the plane. We entered the airport and immediately I felt like I was in another world. People here act, walk and talk differently, which is not a bad thing. So far everyone I have encountered has been incredibly friendly and helpful. We were picked up by the hotel shuttle and brought to the Al-Ghazal Hotel. The hotel is in the middle of sky rises and is camouflaged in an alley. Needless to say it is an adventurous place to stay.

            The lobby was innocent enough. It was when Heather and I stepped in the elevator, which can fit a maximum of 4 people in it while being quite snuggly. After going up seven floors we were immediately greeted by room 702, my home for the next two weeks. It has several quirks such as: no lightbulbs in the multiple lamps that are scattered throughout the rooms, a sink in the kitchen that has a faucet the shakes when it is on, a TV that does not work with remotes void of batteries, a shower without a shower curtain, a sink in the bathroom that showers your feet when it is turned on, several appliances that do not like to work but still exist like a blow dryer, and a door that you have to lock to stay in or out with a key. I like the hotel it has character, and you can know this when you think that a dead cockroach on the wall looks like it is part of the paint job. The cockroaches I anticipate will try to befriend us.

            After exploring the place where I will be staying for awhile, Jahdiel and I decided to take to the streets and see what was around us. We walked out, and found out that we were on the street where apparently Dohaians go to buy furniture. I have never seen as many furniture stores in one single location as I have seen here. I know where to go now to get furniture. We went to several supermarkets, and surveyed them to see which ones would be good to go to for the next several weeks. While out we acquired bread, Nutella, bananas, apples, and Mr. Potato Heads sour cream and onion chips (staple foods of a college student, sort of).

             We then tried to find a restaurant for our Thanksgiving feast. This was interesting. I had not noticed it before we started entering restaurants, but I was one of the only women out at that hour. We tried three places in a row and not a single woman was in any of them. I have never felt so out of place because of my gender. No one criticized me or was mean to me about it, but I have never been in a place where norms for gender roles were in my face as much as they were here. It might have been stranger actually that no one had said anything to me about it, but I just felt like what I was doing was wrong by being in those places. Eventually we found a restaurant that had a section upstairs for family. Downstairs was still filled with men, but at least here I felt like I had a place to be. Jahdiel and I had fun fresh fruit drinks at EastWest Restaurant, and I had fish tikka masala for my Thanksgiving dinner. I have no doubt that this will be an excellent and interesting experience. Tomorrow I go to the Conference of the Youth to establish connections with youth around the world working on climate change policy. I am excited and nervous to meet everyone at this conference.