John Lanchbery, at the Doha UNFCCC conference
Sunday, and I am just back from an early morning walk around the dhow wharf, one of last remnants of the old pearl fishing village of Doha. The rest of the city is brand, spanking new and stretches far out into the deserts of Qatar.
Thanks to its huge reservoirs of natural gas, the Gulf state of Qatar is the richest country in the world in terms of income per person. It is also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (per person), has more skyscrapers than you can shake a stick at and you have to travel by car to get anywhere. It is an odd place to hold the global climate negotiations or, perhaps, it is exactly the right place.
The conference centre where the UN climate talks began last Monday is, of course, enormous, brand new, and miles from anywhere – although it will be close to the huge, air conditioned soccer stadiums that are being built for the World Cup. It is more than 50oC at mid-day here in summer but it is just warm and sunny now with occasional rain, although if you blink, you miss it. Apart from the fact that it can take fifteen minutes to walk from one corner to the other, the conference venue is very good, the Qatari hosts in their flowing robes are friendly and helpful and the building is not aggressively air conditioned.
The conference itself is at its halfway point, having run from Monday morning through to Saturday night. The general feeling is one of rising panic as delegates feel that they are running out of time to agree the many interlinked issues still on the agenda and ministers arrive on Tuesday. In recent days, sessions have run through to the small hours of the morning. On balance, I think that agreement is in sight but a lot of hard choices have still to be made.
We NGOs do not get Sunday off. We have a strategy session at a local university running from noon to seven o’clock, just as we had strategy meetings all of last weekend. Although we talk to delegates almost continuously during the conference, today we have taken the unusual step of inviting four of them to talk at one of our meeting to get their take on things: from South Africa, Pakistan, Costa Rica and France.
We have about a dozen people from BirdLife Partners here: from Qatar, the Lebanon, Iraq, Spain, Germany and Zambia as well as from the Secretariat. We do not, however, have many types of bird. Apart from the ubiquitous pigeons and sparrows I have only seen mynas and laughing doves. Mind you, I am not the world’s best birdwatcher....