The tension in the room!

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by annac in Uncategorized, United Kingdom

Here in Bangkok the negotiations are under way.

So here I am in Bangkok, another round of UN climate negotiations is underway. Yesterday was the first day of talks, though by the end of the day it felt like they had already been going on for a week!

To start with, a bit of good news on the tracking front. After the opening plenary I managed to grab a quick chat with Jan and we agreed to meet later in the week. So I’m off to much easier start than at Bonn, if you remember there I thought I would never even find out what she looked like!

If you have been following the blogs you will also know that since Bonn there has been a lot of talk how important these weeks in Bangkok are. If we want to get a deal that comes anywhere even close to what we need in Copenhagen we need to start seeing a serious upping of the pace, and we need it now. We didn’t get it last week during so called ‘climate week’ so will we see it here?

Well on day one it is hard to tell. But what I did notice is…

Some serious tension in the room.

From the moment the talks started, with welcome addresses from amongst others the Thai Prime minister, everyone seemed to be just that little bit more on edge than they were at Bonn.

In one of the afternoon sessions this tension even spilled over into a full on spat over demands on developing countries between the US and India. That definitely caused quite a stir and gave everyone something to talk about!

But it’s not just the negotiators who feel the tension. In the evening we were all invited to a reception by the Thai Prime Minister. So of course we went along to check it out for the cultural experience (nothing at all to do with the free food and alcohol…).

It was also a good chance to meet up with many friends from all around the world who I have not seen since Bonn. In each of them I could also feel the tension. I could sense from each of them how tired they were already, how difficult they were finding it, how little sleep they were getting. Not just because of these talks, but because of how hard each and everyone of them is working in their respective countries, fighting for our future.

There was definitely a muting of the tone from when we all last met in Bonn.

I have to say, it scared me a bit. To see friends usually so full of life and passion looking so drained was not a great start to these negotiations.

So now I guess the question to ask, is what to do with all this tension?

The way I see it we all have two choices.

We either let it defeat us, we all break down, both activists and negotiators. We start arguing, fighting amongst ourselves because we are just so stressed and tired. And we pretty much grind to a halt.

Or we channel it. We take the tension in the room and we use it productively. We use it to up the pace, to start pushing forward. We recognise the difficult situation we find ourselves in and we support each other through it. We check to make sure that everyone is ok, that everyone is coping, and if not we ask what we can do to make it better. We look out for each other to make sure we all reach our goal together.

I have faith we can do this in the youth climate movement.

But which way this goes in the negotiations…

I guess only time will tell.

Tags: Bangkok, India, Jan Thompson, tck, USA