Postcard from Doha – Is a climate deal on the cards?

Photo: Forests in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains

Got tickets? Check. Got passport? Check. Got my hopes up for a climate deal at Doha? Erm…

By Michelle Winthrop

In three days’ time I’ll be leaving my daily duties in Ethiopia behind, heading off to the annual climate change negotiations (called the ‘Conference of the Parties’) in Doha. Before joining Farm Africa, I worked on climate change in the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), and for a time became a bit of a ‘negotiations geek’.

Since leaving DFID to join Farm Africa, I have stepped out of that world, to focus more on the daily work of an NGO delivering change on the ground.

I’ll be going along to tell as many people as will listen about our forestry work in Ethiopia, and our plans to get an Ethiopian REDD+ programme off the ground next year.

But I’m sure I’ll rediscover my inner ‘negotiations geek’ and after a few days will be spouting acronyms, and getting excited about things like ‘shared but differentiated responsibilities’, ‘Annex 1 vs Annex 2 countries’, and MRV (monitoring, reporting and verification).

It’s easy to be cynical about these negotiations. How much can really be achieved by a meeting of 17,000 people from 194 countries? But when you grapple with the challenges faced by poor smallholder farmers in one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, you’ve got to have hope. So myself and the gang are packing as much optimism and hope into our suitcases… and a large encyclopaedia of COP terminology!

I’ll spare you all the gibberish, but hope you’ll check in occasionally to see how it’s going, and how myself and the Ethiopia team fare in telling our story.

–    Michelle is Farm Africa’s country director in Ethiopia