You are not alone
Posted on 06. Oct, 2010 by Leela Raina in India
eating together
This blog post is dedicated to Ferran the spanish tracker ( www.adoptanegotiator.org/spain ) since he missed the GCCA side event on the BASIC countries yesterday and stayed at the hotel ( to catch up on his very needed tracker beauty sleep )where he was apparently ‘feeling very alone’. I want to reassure him that no one is alone, and this is how I learnt this beautiful lesson yesterday.
First of all thank you so much for all the feeback that you all wrote in for the previous blog and yes I have taken your advise very seriously and went straight up and asked the tougher questions this time.
Its my first day of playing hardball .
Secondly my belief in people was reaffirmed when I saw There are people that you can approach and there are people that you would rather not talk to . It ‘s like one goes to an Indian wedding and is fully aware of the inanimate inamiable stone figured relatives and those of course who are forthcoming , bubbly and buzzing with a great aura around them . Similarly we have a lot of diversity in our delegation this time and always. There are the ones that are approachable and the ones that snub you!
After a short tete a tete with some of the negotiators I got the following information . Although they all said differentiated things but largely agreed that India finds Tianjin hopeful. When asked what kind of legal outcome they expect, I got the answer that they expect legally binding outcome in the form of a COP decision for all the Bali pillars. For 1 B i definitely and as far as finance is concerned they expect atleast an agreement for the finance being available and delivered under the UNFCCC and signs of progress being shown in areas of REDD and registry of NAMAs , tech transfer and other smaller components.
According to a clarrification regarding the BASIC meeting in Rio the negotiators said that they largely found consensus on the Kyoto Protocol related issues and on the Bali Action Plan Mandate. Athough they were challenged to bring out consensus on the level of actions they would like to undertake. Although South Africa and Brazil are willing to bring the sectoral mechanisms to the international levels , India and China largely find it hard to do so.
There will be a meeting for the BASIC countries on the 10 and 11th in Beijing for which technical experts will be flown in , as far as the agenda goes , it is currently being decided and I will post as soon as I know.
There are a few relatively new negotiators in the centre this time whom I will introduce by profiling in my next blog.
Thirdly I by participating in the panel discussion with GCCA colleagues on BASIC , I was relieved to find that there are so many commonalities that can be found in the challenges and hurdles civil societies are facing in the run up to a low carbon future. It was great to start from the differences and then come to the conclusion of maybe putting our socks up in each country and working to open the climate debate to the larger auduience and especially the common man.
We are definitely not alone. never.
and will do out bit together!
Oh Leela, thank you, I guess you were not feeling alone during your speech at the GCCA event :-)