Cancun

Julian Oram, Head of Policy and Campaigns

The dust is starting to settle and my jetlag subsiding after a frantic last week in Cancun. As I readjust to winter, I’ve been taking a cool analysis of those final couple of days of UN climate talks, and the eventual settlement reached in the early hours of Saturday morning.

On the final Friday, a palpable sense of gloom filled the conference. I went to a meeting between some NGOs and a contingent of MEPs accompanying the EU delegation, and was posed a question by an MEP which struck at the heart of what was at stake. “For the poorest and most vulnerable countries,” he asked, “is it more important that the process is kept alive, or that a deal is struck that tackles climate change and its impacts?”

The answer, of course, was both: developing countries depend on a multilateral process to keep their voice heard in the negotiations on climate change; but at the same time a lowest common denominator approach pushed by the US, Canada, Japan and other rich countries would do nothing to help keep climate change in check or help poor countries deal with its effects.

With neither outcome seemingly likely, it was with some despondency that we entered the final sessions of the negotiations. Then, at mid-...

Julian Oram, used to be head of policy and campaigns

I’m writing this on the bus in transit from the ‘hotel zone’ to the conference centre as we enter the final day of negotiations here at the COP16 in Cancun. If I was to describe my mood now the word that comes to mind first is nervous; I feel like its final exam day, although it’s the delegations who will ultimately leave here with the pass or fail mark.

Thursday was an odd day. There were a series of statements from various Ministers in the morning, and again in the late afternoon, on their hopes and fears of what is to come out of here. The perspectives and emphasis differed, but the key message was strikingly similar: we must not let Cancun be a failure; and we must find a way to reach agreement and set aside our individual self-interests to work towards the common goal of averting catastrophic climate change.

In between the set-piece statements, Ministers of some countries were working behind the scenes in ‘informal’ meetings to craft yet another set of negotiating texts. These surfaced around mid-afternoon, although its difficult to be sure of exactly when, because the texts were not made public or posted on the UN website. This is when it becomes useful to have connections to delegations,...

Julian Oram, used to be head of policy and campaigns

Apart from the strong-arm tactics being deployed by rich countries in the formal negotiations, another form of maneuvering is taking place in side events against developing countries here in Cancun.

A side event on Monday afternoon was particularly revealing. Lined up on the panel were seven representatives from the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), nominally reflecting on the ‘lessons learnt’ from their involvement to date in climate finance. Sadly, the event was more one of public relations than of honest evaluation.

Much was made of how these institutions were uniquely positioned to mobilize and coordinate new sources of climate finance; and how they have already massively expanded their portfolio in this area. But there was no assessment of their track record of debt-creation, dirty development, and economic policy conditionalities that harm the poor.

Nor was there any reflection on the appropriateness of forcing the world’s poorest nations to pay twice for a problem they did little to create by taking on new loans for climate adaptation. And there was no discussion about the lack of democratic accountability implicit in the channeling of climate finance through donor-controlled...

This morning, as I was trying to locate the bus to take me down the long mangrove lined road to the building that was host to the COP16 (short hand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), I met Gopal who had traveled from Nepal to be here. Gopal showed me the way to the bus, and we started talking about his work in Nepal. He was an expert in adaptation, researching local, community-led solutions to enable people to adapt to the impacts of climate change. His main focus was in considering how this locally driven knowledge could be shared, replicated and built on.

He talked about the issues now facing Nepal; melting glaciers, increasingly unpredictable rainfall, a net decrease in food production and a huge falls in the level of ground water table that has already forced a notable migration. I asked where his organisation got its funding from, and he reeled off a list of government departments for international development from across Europe.

I then asked how they found working with these donors. At first he was a little hesitant to sound critical, saying that he didn’t work with them directly, that was someone else’s job. But after I probed a little he went on, "The thing is with these donors" he said "is...

Today, we joined Reza, one of our allies from Justice and Equity Working Group in Bangladesh to pay a visit to the World Bank's stall at COP 16. Reza was asking the Bank’s representatives why they were giving loans to a country like Bangladesh, which already has high levels of debt.

Credit: WDM / Kate Blagojevic

Of all countries, Bangladesh certainly shouldn’t be the one shackled with more unfair debt in the name of coping with the impacts of a climate crisis which it wasn’t responsible for causing. One World Bank official started answering his questions, trying to justify the loans by saying they were optional, that countries had chosen to accept them. But Reza wasn't going to be fobbed off with this pathetic justification of something that was clearly hugely unjust, and went on to explain passionately about what the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh meant for the lives of people living there. Clearly, he said, the people were so desperately in need of funds that they had no choice to accept the loans. The Bank official gulped, looking increasingly embarrassed, and in the end refused to answer any more...

Kate Blagovejic, used to be press officer

On high streets across the UK over the last few months, passers-by have been greeted with the sight of World Development Movement groups taking a big stick to papier-mâché, piñata, pigs. This was part of our on-going campaign to highlight that governments should not be pushing for the World ‘piggy’ Bank to be responsible for disbursing climate finance to developing countries.

In the UK, WDM staff and volunteers formed a pig production line in the basement of our office. But in Mexico, the home of the piñata, we have decided to go pro. Consequently, today we spent hours trying to find a certain shop which employs people with learning disabilities, which specialises in making piñatas.