Postcard from Doha - Are you here for the COP?

01 December 2012

Photo: Forest in the Bale Mountain region of Ethiopia.

“Are you here for the COP? You're late,” my taxi driver said to me at 3.30am as he picked me up from the airport. It was true, but I knew that the REAL fun hadn't got started.

I must admit, I spent most of today simply getting my head around it all. State-of-the-art conference facilities, every development organisation you've ever heard of represented, and hundreds of others to boot. The whole conference is supposed to be paperless, so there were lots of rather comical scenes of people waving their phones at barcodes too.

A coffee with Ato Feyera from our local partner SOS Sahel proved instructive. He's an old conferencce 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. There were a lot of good arguments, 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 check whether their actions are making any difference to real people?

Eventually I plucked 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 which issues. Some of the negotiators even managed to keep their sense of humor.... 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.