Today saw the big hitters arrive in Poznan: deputy prime ministers, vice presidents and environment ministers. This morning, as the heavens opened, even if we hadn’t known it was the first day of high-level negotiations, we would have known something was going on.
For a start the UN conference centre was swarming with unfeasibly large security guards talking into their collars. And almost equal in number were the TV satellite vans circling the back of the building, with camera crews loitering in corridors.
Also, suddenly, the food got better in the main canteen. But maybe that one’s my imagination.
Anyway, the stifling air in the conference was adding to the tension, so I decided to pop outside before the opening plenary meeting to gather my thoughts in the fresh air, and wondering what progress might be made, I was joined outside by the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer.
With a couple of heavies in tow, he rolled up a cigarette next to me and talked about the weather. Thirty minutes later he was on the platform for the opening session, and I was in the seated crowd listening to his words of encouragement.
The opening plenary statements were a mixture of high hopes and stark realities. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called for the need to address the financial and climate crisis simultaneously, with Yvo de Boer reiterating that when the world has recovered from the downturn, it will not have recovered from climate change.
Ban Ki Moon called for solidarity, for the industrialised nations not to let our generation down; that a sustained wave of investment needed to be unleashed; that we need to turn away from the models of the past that are no longer working for us.
And then we heard from Poland – the birthplace of “solidarity”. President Lech Kaczyński talked about two types of solidarity – those of climate protection and poverty reduction; and he suggested the two were often not compatible. And these, the words from the host nation. It sent a shiver round the meeting room.
When Bharrat Jagdeo, President of Guyana spoke, we suspected he might have a different attitude to that of Mr Kaczyński. He said that during his time as Guyana’s finance minister he hadn’t seen the relevance of Kyoto, but now he understands firsthand how climate change is intimately linked to development.
And he pointed out that unlike the financial crisis, climate change was not cyclical: it only gets worse. Mr Jagdeo criticised the current efforts by industrialised nations to slow and prevent climate change as woefully inadequate, a view upheld by the Prime Minister of Tuvalu.
Tuvalu is a group of nine tiny islands in the South Pacific that won independence from the UK in 1978. All of the islands are low-lying, with the highest point only 4.5m above sea level.
Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia said the Adaptation Fund (a fund contributed to through taxing international offsetting by developed countries to help pay for the adaptation of developing countries to climate change) was in fact Tuvalu’s survival fund. He told the gathered delegates that while other countries are growing, his is sinking. That the Tuvalu people’s right to exist is being threatened.
We hope the words of both Guyana and Tuvalu were digested by the Polish president.
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