John Lanchbery, RSPB Principal Climate Change Advisor, at the Bonn UNFCCC conference
Thursday and a warm, humid morning breaks over the climate change talks in Bonn. Up early to ensure that I am sufficiently alert to chair the daily NGO 'political coordination' at nine.
Catch the local underground train-***-tram with Montana Brockley from Canada who is taking in our NGO newspaper (ECO) and Jenny Wong from the UN Secretariat who looks after forest and land use issues. We leap off at Max Loebner Strasse with Jenny and Montana heading for the conference centre and me for the Ministry of Transport where us NGOs have our bunker.
Our coordination today is not so much political but a discussion of how we will communicate the latest climate science when the IPCC releases its climate science report in September. We know what the IPCC's 'representative concentration pathways' (RCPs) look like and can identify where we want to be on them but they are far from intuitively obvious and so we need ways of explaining them simply but reliably. For example, RCP2.6 is same as RCP3PDC, with the numbers indicating radiative forcing: 2.6 Watts/square metre is where you end up but 3 is where the peak is before declining to 2.6 ... I hope you are following this because most people cannot. We will call RCP2.6/RCP3PDC the two degree scenario because it gives a good chance of staying below two degrees.
Quick cup of coffee and then off to meet the UK delegation at 11am which they then move to 11.30 so I go to a negotiating group on forests for a while and skip the UK meeting - as does the head of the UK delegation. Next, I chair the NGO group on land use and forests from noon to one o'clock before going to a meeting with EU heads of delegation at 1.15.
2.30 have a sandwich before talking briefly to the Indonesian government forest folk and then, at 3pm, off to another science meeting, this time with Bill Hare from Climate Analytics. They have written another book on climate impacts for the World Bank which the Bank will launch in London next Wednesday - for which I have an invitation. Gloomy news from the scientists. Not only are we on course to four rather than two degrees but it looks as though many impacts will be worse than previously thought, even at low temperatures.
4.30 meet with Ros (from Kenya), Aya (Philippines), Steve (Australia), Josefina (Mexico) and other NGO forest folk to sort out what we will say on tropical forests and land use in the big closing meeting tomorrow. Then go for a walkabout to meet interesting and amusing people, including Kevin (Papua New Guinea lead) and Vincent from Cameroon who often speaks for the Congo Basin Group of countries.
7.30 pm head off to the EU reception in the Environment Ministry. It is the Irish Presidency of the EU so it pours with rain as five of us run for it under three tiny umbrellas. (The five being Jake and a very nice lady from the European Commission, Rob and his beautiful colleague from the United Arab Emirates, and me.) On arrival, immediately run into Frank from the Irish Times for quick chat - actually not that quick a chat, as Frank is an erudite man covering architecture and poetry as well as the environment.
Talk to lots of people: UK head of delegation and lead negotiator, then ditto from France and Germany. Long chat to the EU forest negotiators, including the Dutch (current EU lead), Irish, Austrian, German (used to be an NGO), Swedish and separately, as she dropped by, Brazil.
Ended up outside watching a rainbow fade as the sun set - with the Belgian delegation and most of the forest folk. Then off to the tram and back to Bad Godesberg and bed at about midnight.
The meeting ends on Friday and everyone is very tired. From an RSPB and BirdLife perspective it has gone pretty well. Halting tropical deforestation has gone well with a few hiccups but they can be rectified. The talks on the new 2015 agreement are moving too slowly but they are moving and countries are being constructive. Russia's closing down of the implementation talks was bad and will take time to rectify but the closure freed up for progress elsewhere.