The Bella Centre is a vast network of modern buildings and temporary marquees, set out across several acres of land on the outskirts of Copenhagen. It is here that approximately 15,000 delegates and an equivalent number of NGOs, media and industry lobbyists are working to reach a new global deal on climate change.
The Bella is maybe the size of a small university, but it has an extraordinary energy as pretty much the whole world is represented here, and the urgency of the task could not be more profound.
However, some folks are not listening to the urgency. It’s what I’ve noticed since my arrival in Copenhagen.
The glacial speed of the negotiations are not matching the harrowing signs of the melting glaciers in the outside world. When you get politicians and bureaucrats from 192 nations in one space, it seems that many people revert to type – playing with power, using the rules of poker. Draft after draft of text emerges slowly from the many negotiating rooms. The Danish text, the BASIC Text, the Chair’s text, arrive or are leaked to the NGOS or the media, are debated, and then challenged or discarded. This is where we are after two years of preparation and one week of talks in Denmark. Little progress and waiting for the eleventh hour.
So many nations have made amazing pleas for urgency – most especially from the small island states that are most at risk of climate change … countries like Grenada, Tuvalu, Micronesia. The wealthy countries, such as Australia and the US, are not coming to the party. They’re still not agreeing to the kind of emission cuts that the science dictates are necessary. So many countries are willing to wait until the final hours to “show their hand”. This is the language they use.
In the streets, people are marching, calling for action. Archbishop Desmond Tutu arrives and addresses one crowd. He says: “They marched in Berlin and the wall fell, they marched in South Africa and apartheid ended, we marched in Copenhagen and … ?” The question is both uplifting and frustrating.
In the corridors, you meet many people – Australian negotiators, NGO colleagues, media figures and, of course, the politicians. Information is gathered. It seems that Australia is still sticking to a paltry 15% emission reduction target by 2020 in closed sessions.
We have to increase the pressure to get them to increase the targets, and to get the rich nations to do what’s required. We need a thaw in the ice here at the Bella, to save the ice in the Arctic. Its what the future of humanity requires.
