Postcard from Doha – Are you here for the COP?

Photo: Forest in the Bale Mountain region of Ethiopia.

“Are you here for the COP? You’re late.” That’s what my taxi driver said to me at 3.30am this morning on route from the airport. I managed to suppress the initial swell of panic – deep down I knew that the REAL fun hadn’t really got started.

I must admit, I spent much of today simply getting my head around it all. State-of-the-art conference facilities, every serious development organisation you’ve ever heard of represented – and hundreds of others to boot. Oh – and the whole thing is supposed to be paperless. So lots of rather comical scenes of people waving their phones at barcodes to no avail.

A coffee with Ato Feyera from our local partner SOS Sahel proved instructive. He’s an old COP hand and knows what’s what. I eased myself in gently with a session on the private sector and what they need to think about to adapt to climate change. A lot of good arguments about why companies need to plan for climate change, but a rep from the government of Kenya said it all for me – companies are great at ‘talking up’ their climate actions, but how do they ground-truth this and check whether their actions are making any difference to real people?

Eventually I managed to pluck up the courage and energy to enter real negotiations about the next round of the Kyoto Protocol. It was head-meltingly complex but also fascinating to see who cares about what issues. Some of the negotiators even managed to keep their sense of humour…. something tells me that won’t last!

– Michelle is Farm Africa’s country director in Ethiopia. She’s blogging from the UN Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar. Follow her posts through our Postcard from Doha.