Like tens of thousands of others from around the world, including quite a few Coop members (Rich, Tom and Andy from 1Fl, Sam 20 Arg, Ben 22 Arg), I spent most of December in Copenhagen, to witness and try to influence the UN negotiations on climate change (COP15 – the 15th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework on Climate Change Convention). I’m far from being the only person who’s come back from COP and is writing about it, so I’m not going to repeat the analyses of what happened overall, but give my own perspective on some things I found interesting. Guy, one of the members of the youth delegation I was part of, gives a particularly good summary of the ‘whodunnit’ crime scene: http://climatesafety.org/copenhagen-the-post-mortem/ . You can also have a look at our blog, www.delegation.ukycc.org, if you want to get an idea of what it was like in the UN – it has films, poems, anecdotes and more analytical discussion. As a very short summary, in the words of the Bolivan ambassador to the UN, who came out of the conference centre at 2am on the last night to speak to a group of young people protesting against Obama’s announcement of the Copenhagen Accord: “Copenhagen was a success – not in there, but outside, among the social movements”.
This dichotomy between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ was a strong theme for me, partly because of the tension of being there on the ‘inside’ as an observer as part of a UK youth delegation, while I had many friends who I felt a much more personal and political connection to who were on the outside. We were all there because we passionately believe in the need for Climate Justice, enough to commit our minds and our bodies to struggling for it.
But we had in many ways quite different aims – my team was there primarily to communicate what was going on in a way that was accessible to young people in the UK, and to advocate for youth and climate justice to the powerful people inside. The people on the outside were there to protest against the undemocratic nature of the UN system and to show the strength of the voice for Climate Justice.
I was going to meetings on both ‘sides’ of the divide. I often felt like I was an outsider – which was a bit lonely, until I realized that I was very far from being the only one doing this. This inside/outside divide was interesting and important to a lot of people, including speakers who said that they’d talked at the Klimaforum (the open, free conference for civil society on the outside), and were surprised by how little the people there knew about the details of the negotiations inside, but also how little those inside knew about the ideas being discussed at Klimaforum – the real solutions to climate change being proposed.
The Reclaim Power action (the main focus in Copenhagen for most of the UK activists on the outside), in the middle of the second week of the conference, was a daring attempt at bridging the inside/outside divide. The vision of the action was to ‘overcome, move around and flow through any physical barriers that stand in our way’ and enter the conference grounds, where delegates from the inside would come out and join a People’s Forum. It was on this day that the most obvious separation between inside and outside was exposed – heavy policing prevented the 1500 or so people on the road outside from getting in to the conference area, and harshly beat back the 200 or so people (including several country delegations) coming out to join them.
What next? In the UN talks, the industrialized countries don’t want to make real reductions in emissions, and are trying to buy off the countries to whom we owe a ‘climate debt’ through carbon trading and offsetting. The small island states and African countries, who will feel the effects of climate change most severely and soonest, have taken courage from the number of activists for climate justice from around the world who gathered in Copenhagen. The UN talks will continue in December 2010 in Mexico, and the year after in South Africa. Will we continue to give them another chance, and another chance… or will we take things into our hands and try to actually do something about the situation ourselves?
Emilia 3 Fletchers