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by Dr. Gesa Luedecke
Climate Matters
December 15, 2015
My twitter account has slowed down during the second week of COP21. Was it because no one had new stories to tell from Paris? Did my contacts all leave the conference? If so, with what feelings?
As person that hasn’t been to the summit and therefore was unable to directly pick up the notion of the conference, I am going to write down my thoughts gathered from reading the news coverage and features during COP21. I have been overwhelmed with all the information coming from Le Bourget, through seemingly endless media channels – news, features, background stories, blogs, tweets and so on.
At this conference, the pressure on countries to act has increased. This time the media convey more than ever, that climate change is an issue and Paris an opportunity that requires more attention than in the past years. Almost a decade ago, I did an internship at the German Greenpeace headquarter. At the time some colleagues had started working on a climate refugee report, which back then, sounded like science fiction to me.
Unfortunately our world has changed a lot and we are now facing multiple major crises: climate change, refugee and terrorism intertwining into a perfect storm. For the first time at a COP, all countries seem to be ready to have a conversation about how to shape the future’s energy production and consumption.
Rather than relying on national leaders however, civic engagement appears to be providing the more promising momentum among all international efforts to reach binding pledges below the 2 degrees Celsius warming limit. Earlier last week on this media watch blog, Professor Hans von Storch wrote, “Six years after Copenhagen we continue on our high-speed train into the abyss.” I like this metaphor but have to add, if it only was a train and not an SUV running on fossil fuel, we would definitively be moving closer towards our climate pledges. Read more …
