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“Why not?!” I hear you cry. I work on climate change, I’ve been to previous COPs, I know the players, I know the politics. It is precisely because of this that I’ve chosen not to go.

Firstly, the political reality is that Cancun is about two things: mitigation (developed and developing country and MRV, or trust and transparency as normal people would say) and finance (agreeing how to set up a new global fund; and where the money will come from). In short this is about getting the main political agreements from the Copenhagen Accord formally into the UN system.

It’s no secret that there are certain countries that do not want a deal. Often they will manipulate and at time bully others into adopting a line that blocks progress, even if it is against their own interest. The key to an international deal is to break this negative dynamic. As Wangari Maathai sets out, it’s about rebuilding trust in each other and the UN system. As powerful and almighty as I am (*cough, cough*), I’m afraid I can’t really change that.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to go. It’s exciting and buzzy to be there amongst a great community of people – many of whom are my friends. It’s great for networking and building knowledge. But for actually influencing the negotiations, for all the sound and fury, there is very little that signifies anything – to borrow an in-joke, it’s not a Party-driven process, it’s a process-driven party. Having been part of the one of the key Party delegations, I’ve seen how much the outcomes are dictated by broader politics.

So should we abandon hope? No. There is much work to be done – but at a national level. For example, the UK is passing a raft of funding decisions about mitigation, that most climate NGOs are not engaged in. And Bangladesh, Niger and Tajikistan have just received $280m between them to become more climate resilient (by the way, that’s real money, not just pledges – and it’s already leveraged several hundred million more from development banks) and could genuinely help people cope with climate change. The best way to help the international negotiations is not to be there, but to focus on changing national politics and policies around the world, particularly in laggards (no names mentioned!). It’s about demonstrating that low carbon development doesn’t have to mean poor economic performance, in fact, low carbon development can mean riding new markets and investment now saves money – and that some developing countries have a competitive advantage in these fields.

Finally, I chose to leave the negotiations world because even if we stopped all our emissions now, we would still be locked into a certain amount of change. This will impact on the poorest and most vulnerable (incidentally, this is one key issue to watch out for – how do you define vulnerability. G77 will tie themselves in knots over this). I believe that we will find ways to adapt, but it will not necessarily be done equitably. We have a responsibility to work with governments to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable are addressed. This happens at a national level, not in the halls of the UNFCCC. In some countries this will be highly political and will mean tackling established power relationships – it will not be easy and will demand struggle.

The political and financial attention given to climate change gives us a unique window of opportunity. If we can use climate change to find ways to reduce vulnerability, both concrete on-the-ground interventions and through systemic interventions around governance and power, then we will go some way to address the power inbalances and politics that are at the heart of development and equality.

So instead I will be in Burkina Faso, working with local partners and government to understand how to help local communities manage their water more equitably and sustainably so that they can cope with changes in climate. We don’t have all the answers, but we also don’t have the time to sit around and figure it all out. Therefore we need to find a balance between trying things and developing building blocks – learning-by-doing if you like. In time we will be able to build this knowledge and in turn feed it back into the negotiations.

I don’t pretend that what I’m doing is any more effective than being in Cancun, but if we really want to make a difference to people’s lives, we must look inwards and question what will really drive change and where each of us fits. That’s the change in climate that I want to see.

Well, I’m about to head off on another set of journeys. This time it’s work related. After a short trip to Brussels to take part in the Alliance for Water Stewardship Roundtable, I’ll be heading off to Nigeria for a regional team strategy meeting, supporting their advocacy work. I’m part of WaterAid’s West Africa regional team, one of our regions consisting of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger and Nigeria. There’s plenty I could tell you about each of the countries, but here are some snippets:

• The Sahel region includes part of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. Traditionally, most of the people in the Sahel have been semi-nomadic, grazing livestock in the North during the wet season and migrating south during the dry period. Remember that Barclaycard advert with Rowan Atkinson walking off with a burning carpet saying ‘smell those Touareg campfires’?
• Niger is roughly 2/3 desert and is currently in the grip of a major food crisis. Every year, the country faces food shortages with a ‘hungry season’ from May to July, but this year it started in February. It is the lowest ranked country in the UN’s Human Development Report 2009. WaterAid has just started working in Niger.
• WaterAid has also just started working in the conflict-affected countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, as a joint programme run from Monrovia.
• Nigeria are playing South Korea in the World Cup while I’m there . Go Super Eagles!

After that, I’m heading straight from Abuja through to Bangladesh (well, as straight as the ridiculous aviation industry will allow), where I’ll be for 3 weeks to work with WaterAid Bangladesh on climate change and disaster risk reduction, a combination of some field visits and advocacy work. Bangladesh suffers floods annually – largely due to increases on rain upstream rather than sea level rises (although storm surges from cyclones drive some floods). Flood season is June to September, during the monsoon. Other water related issues that Bangladesh face include arsenic contamination of wells, and salt-water contamination along the coast, driven by over-use of groundwater.

On the sanitation front, WaterAid’s partner, Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) successfully developed the Community Led Total Sanitation (unfortunately abbreviated as CLTS) approach, where communities work to create ‘open defecation free’ villages through changing attitudes and behaviours rather than just building toilets for individual households.

So there we go, a small taste of what I’ll be doing over the next month and some of the challenges in the countries that we work. More to come…

It’s easy to fall prey to criicising those lower down the food chain than you, to mock their sense of self-importance. But the reality is that it hides my sense of self-importance and the fact that my ego feels bruised. There is a genuine sense of disempowerment and acceptance of the state of affairs, but there’s also an ego-driven part of me that wants to play the part.
Now all of this sounds terribly pessimistic, like nothing we do matters, but that’s not true. Nothing most of us do matters here in this forum, but imagine if the energy, passion, creativity and commitment on display here was directed to places that really mattered, where change is possible. What a world we’d live in. But to get there we need individually to look inside and ask ourselves “what am I doing here?” “is this the best place for me to contribute?” “am I here for my ego or to create real change?” “where am I best placed to stimulate change?”. Time to pause. Appreciate the stillness, get perspective. Time to take stock.

A Bear of Very Little Brain

I’m going to try to put down what goes round in my head, my worldview, or at least the main thrust of it. It’s an ever evolving kaleidoscope of thought, but I felt it was time to try to share it more. But as I do so, I’m reminded of a quote from a great sage:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

We are a great moment of change. A period of instability, and in a complex living system, novelty emerges from critical points of instability.

How would I characterise this instability? It’s a feeling. A sense of powerlessness, a general malaise often disguised by escapism and consumerism, but we feel something is wrong and we’re starting to think about it. We work jobs that often have little meaning, that are a means to an end. We are passengers, flotsam in the river of life, slowly being washed out to sea. Our world, our creation, seems out of control – we’ve successfully created a complex living breathing system that is beyond our control. That’s not to say that it’s uncontrolled, it’s just that it is self controlled and although we are the system, we cannot direct it. Control is an emergent phenomena (Frijtof Capra has written some excellent work on these concepts and set up the Center for Ecoliteracy).

How does this lack of control manifest itself? Global inequality, rampant consumerism, war, violence, hunger, poverty, the faltering of the economic system (I won’t describe it as a collapse just yet), climate change. Giddens described it as a runaway world. To me, we are like cellular slime mould – a remarkable organism that will create beautiful complex patterns when a population is grown in a petri dish, patterns that increase in complexity and beauty as the individuals interact in ever more intertwined, networked ways. Eventually this breaks into a third dimension and the individual cells begin to behave like a whole – a 3d organism emerges (there’s a whole other ramble about the role of global communications technologies and the internet in faciliting this development, but I’ll save that for another time).

We as a species have multiplied and grown, interacting with each other in increasingly sophisticated ways until now, we are starting to emerge as a living single organism. That’s not to say that we’re all going to join hands and teach the world to sing, but we are part of an interconnected whole (DFID’s White Paper is but one acknowledgement of this).

This critical point of instability is exciting and worrying – it’s a uncertain and messy, out of our individual control. And the change, the novelty that will emerge, this sort of paradim shift is on the same scale as the Reformation and the Renaissance. Its scale and nature are so great that we cannot comprehend what the other side will look like, yet we will look back and wonder how on earth we thought like we do now. And, try as we might, we cannot plan it and mobilise the masses to bring it to life (although these efforts will be part of the change, just as carrying on will be part of the change – there’s so much more to be said about this, but again, it’ll have to wait). This next R of the world is driven by a cast of thousands of changes and socio-political drivers, yet in a way we can’t do anything about it, it is just happening. In some ways it’s a Reimagining of the world, a Rethinking of our view, but they both imply conscious thought and control. So is it ceding control, a Relaxation of our cartesian desires? Or is it simply a Realisation, a Revealing (or perhaps for those with a more biblical bent, a Revelation)?

2 weeks of negotiations between some 200 countries in pursuit of an ambitious global deal on climate change. When you think of what’s at stake, the whole process seems cumbersome and inadequate, but what alternative is there?
I’m here representing the UK on so called bunker fuel emissions, basically emissions from international aviation and shipping. It’s a painful topic, sadly omitted from Kyoto as a tragedy of the commons. Unable to agree responsibility for the emissions, the issue was shunted into ICAO and IMO, the international bodies responsible for aviation and shipping respectively. 12 years later, nothing has really changed.
The EU has taken it’s own action on aviation, the UK has taken on bold domestic targets, but at the end of the day, few countries are even willing to discuss it in the UN.
However, what has changed is the surrounding political environment. Just last week we saw ‘super september’ with the G20, Major Economies Forum and the UN general Assembly all talking about climate change. Whilst bunkers remains a marginal issue (despite what others may say, the sectors collectively only represent about 3% of global emissions), this new political climate means that Copenhagen is the best chance of making progress on climate change as a whole and by extension, bunkers. The challenge is to move beyond our traditional position based posturing and actually start listening and thinking creatively about solving a ‘wicked problem’ that brings together a global environmental issue, global trade (and therefore development), global equity and equality and individual travel choices. I’m still hopeful…

Carry on

So having made one life decision, another one has presented itself. Just as I made the decision in my head to come back, two amazing opportunities cropped up. Ironically neither result from the proverbial career irons I shoved in the fire (see earlier post Why?), but both fill me with an excitement and passion that I haven’t felt for a long time without being strapped to a snowboard.

They are similar in that they relate to climate change and how it can change the way we do things for the better. But they are both very different in terms of working environment, culture and future directions. They both tick the boxes of contribution to something meaningful and personal/professional development.

One is at the nexus of climate change, business and the citizen-consumer. Hopefully I’m not breaking any confidentiality agreements, but it is in a large retailer – a very large one, dealing mainly with UK food, but expanding internationally and in non-food (specifically finance). If I was to re-enter the corporate world, this would be the organisation, both in terms of scale of impact, culture and board-level leadership. The job has a real immediacy to it. It is a fast-paced world, where my actions would have real direct implications for hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The job is about addressing climate change in a commercial environment. For me, it would be a very challenging context – I would be surrounded by people who are not necessarily climate-oriented or interested in climate change for the same reasons as I am, but that’s what makes this role absolutely at the heart of handling climate change in the real world.

The other, just as fair, is on another new frontier – the intersection between climate change, conflict and governance. Understanding how climate change links to conflict and using that to build peace – in particular, supporting inclusive, participatory approaches to decision-making as a central part of the solution to both challenges. Working in a very influential and well respected international NGO, with people who are passionate about the issues, have jobs driven by larger purpose and take time to consider the complexity of the problems. The role would be really engaging with the complexity of all three problems, through advocacy and direct contributions to real-world, on-the-ground projects in some very interesting and demanding places. It would have a longer-term, strategic bent, allowing me to grow into other areas that I care about and again, would be directly at the heart of my interest in climate change,

Perhaps it comes back to the question of contribution. I feel like I have so much to give and have been trying to find where to give it, feeling that I just don’t fit in the current job market – now suddenly there are two opportunities that fit me perfectly. I want to contribute to the changes that I feel are happening in the world, but where am I best placed to do it? But perhaps more importantly, which is right for me as an individual? My mind tells me that there is no such thing as a wrong decision, but I feel at a fork in the road and choosing a path is never simple.

It’s made me think back to the first post I wrote about heading to New Zealand (Thanks Bob – the themes of that poem keep coming back to me!). “What am I hoping to get out of it? Space. Time. Freedom to think about what actually matters to me, about how I’d like to be remembered and about what the hell to do with myself and the precious gift of life.” I’m beginning to feel like maybe I’m getting a handle on those questions, and although the decision may be hard, what’s important is that either of these jobs will help me along my road less travelled.