“I woke up this morning crying, and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit,” the representative of the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu said, choking up as he addressed the plenary crowded with hundreds of delegates. “The fate of my country rests in your hands.” He argued passionately for strong and legally binding emission cuts as soon as possible, speaking for citizens of atolls and islands around the globe that could disappear in the next century from rising sea levels.

Low-lying atolls, many that support entire nations of people, are at risk of disappearing as sea level rises. Pictured here are the Maldives, one such country at risk. Image courtesy NASA.

While the first week of negotiations has drawn to a close in Copenhagen, the delegates of the 192 nations present will likely be up all weekend and late nights trying to hammer out a deal addressing global climate change. As a student in this bewildering maelstrom, I want to offer my perspectives on this conference so far by relating several stories and observations.

Judging from the media storm covering the event, it’s hard to get a clear picture of what happens here, even inside the conference as a participant. And of course, none of us in the Stanford delegation have much clue of what’s going on inside the closed negotiation rooms. Nonetheless, here are some of the shards of clarity that seem to be constructing themselves within the walls of this center that resonate.

Nothing will be simple. Attending all these side events, one thing is eminently clear – the world is a very complex place and similarly, addressing climate change spans endless facets of science, economics, ethics, politics, justice and law, just to name a few. Let me illustrate this. I wrote last time about the exciting talks I heard regarding a mechanism called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). The theory is this – by providing economic incentives the developed world can help the developing world slow the rate of deforestation (~20-25% of global carbon emissions). This is a very cheap way of reducing emissions for both parties and it provides immense co-benefits of preserving biological diversity, maintaining valuable services such as air and water purification that the ecosystems provide to people, and helping these nations provide jobs and proceed along the path of economic development.

It’s an easy win-win situation, right? Not quite. I first went to a series of talks by Google, several Stanford scientists, and several non-governmental organizations talking about pilot projects and how REDD can be measured (no trivial task, I assure you – you have to be able to measure the amount of carbon in a tropical rainforest and be able to detect losses of the forest from satellite). But even if you can measure it, you still have to design the REDD framework (a political and logistical process, with plenty of economic and law analyses), finance it (an international negotiation and political fiasco), distribute the finances (dealing with weak capacity and sometimes corrupt governance in these countries), scale it across nations very quickly (business, engineering and organizational challenge), and then monitor the success. And even then, you’ve left out very critical ethical and moral dimensions involving indigenous people’s rights (who, understandably, don’t like being told what to do with their lands); thus, any REDD scheme has to involve local community input and participation. Compound that with growing global demand for cropland and food, timber, and other resources and you get my point. Implementing REDD is one of the areas that there is striking agreement among nations, but it is still not a simple nor guaranteed-to-succeed solution.

Climate demonstrators express concern for tiny Tuvalu. Photo: Arlo Hemphill

We have shared ground. It’s easy to focus on disagreement and controversy. As frustrations mount this next week leading up to the conclusion of this conference, and as protestors and demonstrators make a show outside and in the city, it’s easy to lose the message in the windstorm. There are tough issues. There is immense urgency. No one will be 100% happy with what comes out of these agreements. But it has become immensely clear to me how much shared ground we have. I spent a summer on an atoll that, like Tuvalu, is in danger of disappearing forever within my lifetime. I was advised by a Stanford English Professor and poet to “go somewhere where something is about to disappear forever from the world.” I followed her advice and my life has never been the same since.

Opportunity for the future. I heard a fantastic talk by a person from a US consulting company emphasizing that the idea of addressing climate change is going to destroy economic prosperity is ridiculous. The point of the talk was that climate change policy is an immense opportunity to drive sustainable economic development for the US and the world. He cited a McKinsey & Co. report that found that replacing all fossil fuels in the US electricity generation industry with renewable energy would lead to a net increase in US jobs. He concluded his point by joking that perhaps we should ask the coal miners whether they would prefer to mine coal or not…

As far as an update on the actual negotiations, preliminary drafts of text have been released by the major negotiation parties, which is a major first step (according to a lead US negotiator that we were briefed by, this is amazingly early). A lot of the hardest things have not yet been negotiated, so a lot of work remains.

I like to think of it as a hurricane, a climate-change intensified gale-force storm, if you will. Each person, each organization, each blog post, each idea comprises a water droplet flying through the chaos. No one person can understand or navigate the storm, but it is gaining momentum. And the beauty is in the reflections of millions of water droplets and the crystalline images of the faces in the winds.

And let’s hope we address the storm before Tuvalu disappears.

A group of Stanford delegates meet at COP15. Photo: Stephen Schneider

- posted by William R.L. Anderegg