Spending 3 hours in a ‘suite’ of the millennium stadium in Cardiff could never be called exciting in itself: the sandwiches are pretty gross and you feel like you’re in the middle of an industrial warehouse. However, if, you were to find yourself there to take part in a consultation with the Welsh Government on their new Sustainable Development Duty Bill you might just exit feeling as excited as I did.

Yes, this is going to be about Wales.

And yes, it will be about Welsh Government.

BUT, it relates to all of us who are interested in issues of SD all around the world because having a working example of what Government engagement and consultation on issues of SD is invaluable in lobbying other countries to do the same, to rise to the challenge.

Wales is now hailed as the only country with SD written into its constitution (surely this isn’t true?!), meaning, every member of Government has a basic duty to implement policies in full consideration of SD issues.

Ages ago the Government produced this strategy called ‘One Wales, One Planet’ which despite my initial nagging scepticism screaming GREENWASH at me, has actually proven to be a serious and comprehensive blueprint of how Wales aims to reduce its footprint on the planet. Amongst many measures which all come under the banner of SD it has included drastic planning changes to how new housing is built in Wales (all new housing stock must be zero carbon after 2015), it has made Wales the leader in waste disposal as 80% of homes in Wales are serviced with regular doorstep recycling and composting facilities, etc etc.

What is the point in creating an SD Duty?

Good Q. And I suppose this was what todays initial consultation was supposed to glean from those outside of government. So far a vision and an aim of the duty have been outlined by the Welsh Government, now it was our turn to contribute our thoughts on the definition of SD, the content of the legislation, the purpose of the duty, and the way in which it should be implemented.

According to the governments discussion paper:

“Sustainable development is our central organising principle. This means that our approach to Government is about:

• Taking decisions that are effective in the long run, and not just over the short term.

• Taking a joined-up approach to Government, ensuring that the economic, social and the environmental issues that enhance people’s quality of life are integrated into everything that we do.

• Working in partnership with others, so that participation and engagement with people, communities, businesses, the third sector, and the public sector in Wales is central to how we make decisions.”

As you might expect there were many different ideas and interests; most people were of a consensus that it needs to be able to hold public sector bodies and businesses to account for breaking the duty, but most of all, it needs to be an incentiviser, a goal setter and the catalyst for dialogue.

The First Minister of Wales announced that the bill to further elaborate on the existing constitutional duty is

“…about defining the long term development path for our nation. It means healthy, productive people; vibrant, inclusive communities; a diverse and resilient environment and an advanced and innovative economy.”

The Welsh Government wants to attract business and investment into Wales that wants to be in Wales because of the SD Duty; it wants to create a positive obligation on the Welsh Assembly and the Government, rather than just restricting and regulating everything it does. The best way of putting this duty into practical terms would be to say that it seeks to create a positive mentality rather than a list of tasks and extra bureaucracy that everyone just ticks off but doesn’t engage with in any way.

That sounds good to me, but will it work?

I think the best I can offer is, you don’t know until you try. With most environmental law that isn’t regulatory, that is it contains substantive values, it is very new, and so no one can predict the effect accurately but you can at least try and learn from other areas of practice.

Has this ever been done before by a Government?

There’s a great bit of a speech by Welshman Phil Williams talking about Wales’ SD Constitutional Duty:

“In our euphoric moments we claim that we are the only parliament alongside the parliaments of Tasmania who have a constitutional duty to pursue sustainable development. It is a sophisticated Welsh device to always claim to be second or one of two. Anyone can claim to have a unique feature: all you need to do is fail to look anywhere else.” [speech found here]

One environmental lawyer recently said that legislation is needed to create legal duties and monitoring of Sustainable Development, instead of hotch potch good practice springing up here and there.

And there certainly are SD Duties of public bodies and councils etc, but not so much on the Constitutional level. Given the supposed longevity and difficulty in amending a country’s constitution, this is why such a fuss is being made.

In a different spin on the same issues, Bolivia has enacted laws which make Mother Earth Rights equal to those of human rights. That means that its mineral deposits and natural resources have been redefined as ‘blessings’. This is the spiritual, indigenous peoples version of a sustainable development duty which usually defines peoples, resources and the environment in a very anthropocentric way, this more holistic version considers all entities equal-humans, environment, animals, resources etc. These laws are projected to halt large infrastructure projects, restrict the mining that has created mammoth environmental pollution in Bolivia as well as empowering communities to be involved in decision making and challenging large corporations active in Bolivia. Framed differently this is how I would envisage an SD Duty working in this country.

The other aspect of the Welsh Government which could prove a great addition to an SD Duty is the position of ‘Commissioner for Sustainable Futures’.

SD easily slots into the mandate of a future generations commissioner because without SD future generations can expect a much depleted and dirtier future devoid of many things in the natural world that we take for granted today.

I would hesitantly say, that a legal duty that can be prescriptive and specific about how to meet certain requirements/regulations as well as inspire a positive and long term mentality and behavioural change in public institutions through the principles and aims it embodies,  will have more capacity to instill long term change than one person (even with their own commission behind them) ever could.

However, the value of having a commissioner on top of a duty is that it is everyones role to implement the duty (so half of the commissioner’s job is done) leaving the Commissioner free to check up on implementation and possibly seek enforcement actions where the body/person has breached their duty on behalf of future generations. So its time for Welsh youth to swing into action and make the most of this guy, after all he needs a mandate, so lets give him one!

Moving forward, beyond this initial consultation the Welsh Government will be conducting sectoral consultations (e.g forestry, business etc), and hopefully Dyfodol can secure one for young people.

As much as I was happy to be there, most young people would have felt that their quality of simply ‘being’ a young person was not enough to bring to the table. It is hard to stand your ground when the person next to you runs a big charity, or the person opposite used to be the Welsh Environment Minister. For a duty that is for the benefit of future generations, and the future of the current generation, there needs to be some creative brainstorming and some serious buy in by those of us whose future in Wales it will affect.

**Watch this space and if you’re interested in being involved in the youth consultations post a comment below or get in touch with Dyfodol**

[image sources: CackleTV, http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/2183 & IC Network]

The flying revolution, romanticised by the beautiful old airplanes and pilots with flying goggles and aviator jackets, and made doubly appealing by films like “Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines” (a childhood favourite), has been appealing from the outset.

How could it not be?

As it became safer, more commercialised and glossy it became more accessible to ordinary people who weren’t pilots, part of the armed forces or a celebrity.

Couple the romance with the innovation of opportunity that comes with throwing the world wide open for anyone to explore as much as they dare and you have a potent combination of feelings associated with flying. I even feel all of those things myself….

I only made this decision when I was about 17 or 18 years old, so about 4-5 years ago. Before that, there was a period where our family would make about one flight a year, of varying distances; this period included a long-haul flight to Australasia, and flights to Turkey and Lapland, all great places. My last flight was made amidst great soul-searching as I had been on the verge of making the decision but then my aunt and uncle wanted to get married in Tobago! So I made that one last journey, with a lot of emotional blackmail baggage both from myself and a few friends….so I know the feeling, and yes, to an extent the whole process of checking in and taking off is exciting and “part” of going on holiday, but since then I have discovered a very different way of travelling….

Why would you decide not to fly?

There’s many a different argument why we shouldn’t, here are some that I considered:

Carbon emissions:

For any environmentalist this is the big one!

1. Flying uses 3 times as much energy per mile travelled (per passenger) than a train.
2. The effect of emitting greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is more potent at the height that a plane travels than at ground level. By EU standards (for planes) this means the same greenhouse gases released by an airplane are 2.5 – 2.7 times stronger than those released by a car at ground level.

Combined, these two effects mean that per mile you travel in a plane, you are causing 7.5 times as much environmental damage than if you travelled by train. And the difference is even bigger if you travel by coach or car because they emit less than trains. Furthermore, the shorter the plane journey, proportionally, the more harm you are causing because the plane’s emissions are highest at take off and landing. Eurostar has calculated that by taking the train from London to Paris instead of flying each passenger cuts their travelling emissions by 90%, a HUGE figure!

As a local community puts it on their website:

“Let’s try to put it into perspective:
We try to be reasonable in our car use, by for example not making unnecessary trips to the shops which are only a couple of miles away.

Maybe over the course of the year, by cycling, car sharing etc, we might save 100 trips, and therefore perhaps feel that we have done something positive for the environment.

But each car trip, of 4 miles, is the equivalent to just one passengers’ share of an airplane for just 11 seconds.”

And just for those who advocate “offsetting” when you fly, DON’T BOTHER. Please check out this fantastic little film about why carbon offsetting just does.not.work

Consumer power:

As a privileged individual from a developed country with enough money (or ability to make the money) to be able to afford to make decisions between means of transport (i.e I am not forced to fly to get anywhere) I should take my consumer power seriously. Those of us who have always had consumer power don’t even think about what we are spending our money on or who is getting the profit in the end. We just don’t.

Large companies with different product lines watch very closely where consumers spend their money and where they don’t, withdrawing lines that people aren’t taking up and coming up with different versions and ‘limited editions’ of lines that people do like. Airlines cannot afford to fly empty planes, so vote with your purse.

It’s time to take responsibility for where you spend your money, time to put my money where my mouth is in my case.

Quality of experience:

This is a less penalising justification for choosing public transport over flying!

Whilst this will depend on whether you mind sharing a room with strangers, or whether you are prepared to talk to someone sitting next to you, quality of experience means that when you travel by slower means you are likely to meet more people. Amazing people, annoying people, kind people, people you can’t communicate with through language, scary people. But that is the beauty of public transport travelling!

I have met an African Diamond dealer; a recently self-released hermit who had cleared bodies from the beach of the Boxing-Day Tsunami, set up an orphanage and hung out with the Malaysian Princess; Mongolian clothes smugglers; an old Dutch man who took disabled young people on train journeys around the world; a friend of the Prince of Monaco who paid for my train ticket, and many many more interesting characters.

Every single one of them added to my journey and memory of the trip. Some of them gave me great advice, some of them I gave (great) advice too-I have still have the silver water bottled in a viagra dropper bottle that the hermit had brewed himself (believe it or not I did actually let him put some of his home-brewed silver water IN my eye….that was a little stupid though).

Then there’s the views. When you are high up in the atmosphere you have none for the majority of the journey. I always feel much more of a connection to where I’m going if I’ve been watching my progress.

The food is often much better on trains (not relevant on coaches) than on planes! On our train journey from the UK to Mongolia there was a Russian food cart going through Russia and Siberia, and then a Mongolian food cart when the train reached the Russian/Mongolian border. It was all far more interesting than vacuum-packed bread and fruit salad that disintegrates into compost in your mouth.

Culture Shock: Most simple of all: why do you think people get culture shock as soon as they step off a plane in Mumbai? Finding themselves surrounded by poverty and unfamiliar colours, smells and people for 5 minutes they turn right around and step right back onto the first plane heading straight back to London – this has happened.

There is no context for your arrival in Mumbai. Lifting off in London financial capital of wherever, a developed country blah blah blah, there has been no transition to the less developed country half way round the world, only an extraction from reality for however many hours it takes, and then you’re placed on the ground again, somewhere “a whole world away” from your own.

By public transport you see the changing landscape, you see the transition between countries, peoples and ways of life to an extent, even though you are travelling at 80mph. You have at the very least, an idea of what’s coming, and so the likelihood of culture shock is drastically reduced. When I arrived in Mongolia, at no point did I get one of those realisation moments “oh my god I am in Mongolia!”, no, every time I realised I hadn’t had one of those moments I just thought “I bloody well am in Mongolia because it took me 6 days to get here”.

Some other powerful arguments

Love miles: I’ve heard many a staunch environmentalist talk about their decision not to fly….and then happily qualify their decision with the ‘love miles’ argument. That is, “well I live in the UK but my daughter has permanently moved to India” so you excuse yourself with a return flight to India every few years, because you obviously love your daughter. This argument is such an emotive one. No one, when pushed, is willing to give up their familial relationships for the sake of their carbon emissions. Opening up the world brings its consequences, positive and negative, one of them being people’s unwillingness to just settle in the country where they were born, or for some, have more than one home on more than one continent. There is no easy answer to this one, but all of the weighing up I keep referring to should still be relevant…..blinded by love comes to mind…..

Expense: There’s a touch of the chicken and egg scenario in this one. Yes planes are often cheaper, yes you could argue you then have more money to spend in the local economy when you arrive if you flew more cheaply.

There needs to be the demand for the cost to go down as well as much better government investment in their public transport infrastructures. If there was an international commitment to streamline public transport networks similar to the way airlines can manage their flights, the travel times would also be streamlined as well as the cost.

In the meantime the argument I use for justifying spending more money on train travel than I do on clothes, food etc, is simply that travelling must be costly, why should we be able to transport ourselves around the world with as little cost to ourselves but maximum cost to the planet and those who rely on it? Public transport is a ‘good thing’ to put my money into I tell myself, and if I can’t afford the non-flying option this time around, I just don’t go, saving the money for one great trip when I do have sufficient funds, making it all the more worthwhile.

I will never be able to evade the fact that I come from a family who did have a holiday once a year, and so could afford to choose not to fly most of the time, so I cannot justify myself to those families who work all the year round to be able to afford one cheap flight for the family to go on holiday ever year/2 years, etc. But given that the majority of flights are either business or those families who fly on holiday at least twice a year, it is those people who I aim my argument at, because they make up the primary consumers of flights, when they needn’t.

The ‘Greater Cause’: Whatever your cause is, with the advent of the internet and globalisation it’s likely it will have an element of business/contact/actions outside of the country you live in. Amongst the environmental movement, rightly so in my opinion, there are many that battle with the conundrum of flying to spread the word, strategically educating people in other countries so that they can then pass the knowledge on within their country, attending conferences (e.g the UN Climate Negotiations) to try and effect change on a greater level (on an international and state level) which you could never achieve by yourself etc etc I could go on.

This one has a powerful draw for someone like myself who advocates both personal actions, national actions and international co-operation on an issue like climate change and sustainably. Every decision I make to travel (so far avoiding flying) has been painstakingly researched to look for alternative less carbon-heavy methods of travel, how I would be contributing once I got there, and the likelihood that I would actually be adding something that would be missing if I wasn’t there. In 2010 I made the decision to stay in the UK for the UN Climate Negotiations annual Conference of the Parties (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico; I knew that I could support a team of other people to do what I would have done, and they were already going, so there are often ways round conundrums, even if its a bit self-sacrificing.

When there just aren’t ways round it, I have heard powerful personal justifications of how seriously the decision was taken, and that within the current system of flawed non-flying transport infrastructure, it is still the quickest and most economical way to travel long-haul. As long as this attitude does not give way to apathy and taking the effects of your actions for granted, as long as it really means you fight for a better world when you get there, or, it makes you more able to fight for a better world (e.g soul food from love miles!) I might hesitatingly, and with a heavy heart make the decision to fly.

Ultimately I have to weigh up how much of a hypocrite I can bear to be, how much flying would compromise everything I am fighting for, and how much I need to go.

If only I had stayed ignorant, life would be so much easier!

I want to try and give you a broad view of all the different kinds of people, and the processes and businesses that rely on the sea, so that we can see how much of a resource it really is in our hyper-techno world that likes to think it takes us far away from having to rely on dirty nature.

I start with oil.

yes, that dirty word, the commodity our entire existence is now built upon. When oil prices go up, the price of everything else goes up with it.

Why is that?

simply it is because we use so much fertiliser on our crops (a main component in fertiliser) that we basically plough oil into our food. Most of our cheap fish and shellfish is caught by ginormous trawlers that are powered by oil. Plastics that we use even to package our food and make our hair shiny are made with oil. And planes that take is to the ends of the earth, also rely on oil. Oil is the bedrock of Western society, unfortunately, if developing countries want to imitate us, or even have enough money to eat, they also need to participate in the same market which has oil at its centre-even if their way of living is so basic they rarely come into contact with oil itself.

So how does this affect the sea?

Firstly 90% of the rubbish in the sea is plastic.

Secondly Oil reserves exist on and off-shore, i.e under the land, and under the sea. We have mostly used up the reserves onshore so offshore drilling for oil is seen as the most hopeful but also the most hazardous because it can involve depths of up to 2,300m down into the sea. When the oil is found it is transported from the well through an underwater pipe lying on the sea bed which either takes the oil to the country buying it, or drops it off on land for a tanker to fill up. The initial problem of where do the pipelines get laid? Through virgin forests? Through your local village?

check out some incredible photos of Canada’s Great Bear Forest, threatened by a pipeline; a pipeline for Exxon Mobil was laid in the Niger Delta, the most biodiverse area in Nigeria; or local to me,  the UK’s gas supply being piped through the Brecon Beacons national park.

It is this pipe that burst in the recent Gulf Oil Spill off the coast of Mexico. So it is oil spills which, although rare (about 6 a year on average), can cause lasting and unending damage to the sea. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 will be visible on the Alaskan coast for 30 years; some of the fish stocks have never come back, and 90% of their salt marshes and magroves which prevent coastal erosion are still very damaged.

The 2010 Gulf oil spill was unfortunate enough to hit the coastal wetlands on the Gulf; when covered in an oil slick wetlands can’t be rejuvenated, they simply sit there covered in oil and die. These wetlands are, or should I say were, the main source of income for thousands of fisherman on the Gulf coast.

When the spill hit it was the beginning of the shrimp season, a time to make your money as a fisherman for sure. Being a fisherman is hard at the best of times, but when the middleman that you sell too is saying this:

“I made the mistake of looking at what happened in Alaska on the computer last night, then I couldn’t even sleep, they’ve still got problems over there. If it takes me 20 years to recover, I’m out of business. That’s my whole life down the drain.”

then you know the shit has really hit the fan.

Locals living on the coast were also advised that ‘people near the coast who experience nausea, headaches or other smell-related ailments to stay inside, turn on air conditioners and avoid exerting themselves outdoors.’ Apparantly health risks from the oil at sea include temporary, minor nuisances such as runny noses and headaches to long-term risks such as cancer if contaminated seafood ends up in the marketplace.

!!!!

So you get it, although we need oil to sustain our lives currently (apparantly) it can ruin lives.

Canary in the Cage

The indigenous populations around the world are often described as the canaries of climate change, that is if they are feeling the effects then that is a sign of worse to come. This is so because indigenous people live in harmony with nature, they rely on the natural world for everything, and very rarely step into the modern culture of their native country because they feel satisfied and at one with their life. So if they are sounding alarms because their food sources are disappearing, or their homes being flooded, then we should realise something is going wrong.

Now I can understand why the 2 words ‘indigenous peoples’ turns people off, because they are fairly far from our reality, but I think that is why they are amazing, intriguing and wise, and that, in my book, makes them worth listening too.

The Bajau are Indonesia’s ‘sea gypsies’, they have entirely on their boats, at sea, for 200 years or so now. They are renowned for their deep sea diving-they purposely burst their eardrums at an early age, lying down for a week because of the dizzyness-living off the fruits of their seas and supplying some of the islands of Indonesia with highly prized fish for the Restaurants and sea cucumbers for soup and medicine.

If you were reading the UNfairplay blog for Copenhagen, or even this one, you might recall his Presidency Anote Tong featuring once or twice. He said that for Kiribati “Fishing accounts for about 45% of government tax revenue and is an important source of livelihoods.” That Government tax revenue goes into building sea defences, protecting their coral reefs, and creating schemes like the Pacific Oceanscape, as well as the usual hospital, schools and services malarky.

The Inuit are one of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and subarctic regions  of Greenland,  Alaska, Canada, and far-eastern Russia. They adapted over  centuries to life in a polar climate by  becoming almost totally reliant on the sea to  supply their food and other needs.

If you’ve ever seen footage of these ice lands that the Inuits inhabit, you’ll notice there is no 

vegetation, no soil, nothing, so caribou, seal, walrus, whale meat, whale blubber and fish were

their major food sources, as well as the source of raw materials for clothing, tents and boats. 

Seals were hunted from ice floes or from skin-covered kayaks. Nowadays the Inuits live in the

same sorts of houses we live in, they also eat mostly processed food and buy mostly 

westernised clothing, but although the tradition of hunting and fishing is still very strong, they 

have been starting to suffer from diabetes and tooth decay because of their new diets, and 

their rate of suicide is one of the highest in the world.

The Inuit people are often employed by oil companies, as the Arctic is now seen as the next major area of oil reserves that we should plunder, and the Inuits

are definitely behind them. Upon Greenpeace occupying an oil drilling platform which was exploring the potential for oil, the Prime Minister of Greenland told them to get off because they welcomed the oil companies with open arms if it signalled economic benefits and employment. If only they had heard of the Happy Planet Index which shows that more money, consumerist fast societies actually makes people less happy. The countries who did not experience war, famine or extreme natural disasters are the happiest, they are also the least developed; it’s a shame the Inuits don’t intend to return to relying on the sea for anything other than oil.

I’ll finish with a story closer to home. I live in a 200 year old harbour town called Aberaeron, on the west coast of Wales. This town was a thriving thanks to the harbour at its centre, harbouring massive ships bringing in coal, flour, tin, lime, slate and other essentials for the surrounding area. Since the imports changed and the harbour became less useful the working population of the town left to go elsewhere, so we are now left with a town full of retired residents and second homers. Import shipping was replaced with fishing for the area, which has now been replaced by recreational yachts and speed boats, with only 1 fisherman left who works from this harboue-my Dad gave up about 5 years ago due to declining fish stocks and the unprofitability of sustainable fishing compared to the mass fishing producing cheap and exotic imports from around the world. Our town has gone from being a bustling harbour town reliant on the sea to a touristy town of ailing old ladies and yachtsmen.

Lastly, as I touched on in Part 1, fishing is an important souce of protein for a large portion of the planet’s population, as well as directly employing over 36,000 people in the fishing and aquaculture industry. But it isn’t all fun and games:

I won’t bore you with the cliches we are all used to when the sea is mentioned, but what can I say to convey to you the importance, the magnitude of power, the beauty and the intensity that is the sea??

I have lived by the sea all my life, watching and reading about the changes occurring in the seas all over the world creates 2 ways of looking at it:

1. What lies beneath the surface that we are affecting
2. And how below is affecting those above the surface

Part 1

Have you ever seen the incredible BBC David Attenborough series called Life?

If you have you will know what I mean when I say there is much more to the sea than the sharks, dolphins and whales you see in films (making up less than 2% of the sea’s life), and the fish that you eat day to day.

There are translucent beauties that float around in the pitch black of the massive depths of ocean.

There are incredible weedy sea dragons that float with water flows; large fish literally with lanterns hanging off their faces to light the way; delicate and succulent looking coral with colours that reflect the palette of an artist with indescribable variety of textures and shapes and sizes.

Immense shoals of tiny fish who flit and fluctuate with their predators and the tides that shape their shoal.

Put together the under water is other worldly.

As you would expect from an ecosystem that is absolutely chockablock full of zillions of species that no one will ever discover, (In 2004 alone 13,000 new marine species were discovered, according to the Census of Marine Life.) it is finely tuned to balance the existence of all the species it supports, thus anything that disrupts that balance, that takes away a piece of that puzzle, has a profound effect on not just the immediate species reliant on it but hundreds more who also rely on that one.

More than just a goldfish bowl

Not only is the sea home to an incredible mixture of creatures it also plays a very important role in the regulation (maintaining the balance) of the planet we live on.

The first of the seas major planetary responsibilities lies in it’s salt, or salinity (concentration of salt in the water).

Salinity has a direct link to density, which in turn affects the currents that are found in all the different oceans. You may be aware that there are many different sets of currents all over the world, which put together regulate the heat of the planet by moving heat around and also being part of the water cycle which gives us rain (because sea carries heat in it), so changing salinity = changing currents = changing climate

According to the MET office in London the salinity in sub-tropical Atlantic seas is increasing, and this is likely to be caused by higher temperatures causing more evaporation than before so whats left is a higher concentration of salt water and more rain in the north because the winds carried the evaporated water that way.

Next up, temperature rise.

Although every skeptic in town will always focus on rising sea levels as the pinnacle of the seas plight (and thus because the difference is only slight climate change is not actually happening), the real killer is temperature rise.

One of the first effects of temperature rise relies on a chemical reaction you learnt in your first chemistry lesson-when water heats up, it expands, thus leading to rising sea levels and also the killing off the coral reefs thriving in lots of different environments around the world. Kiribati, a small Pacific Island, is surrounded by coral reefs; half of Australia’s tourism comes from glass bottomed boats and divers itching to the see the Great Barrier Reef, the problem is that even a slight but persistent rise in acidity can cause corals to ‘bleach’. A process where they flush out the very stuff that keeps them alive.

Water temperature rise along with ocean acidification (literally means the sea’s PH gets more acid and less neutral-neutral being the most hospitable to life) is the final knock on the head for many species; the complex nature of earth processes means that it can be described as many many circles, some of which are interconnected, and thus when one is affected another is triggered; so when the wheel of rising carbon dioxide emissions starts to turn, it immediately triggers the wheel of rising temperatures which affect the seas temperature, turning the wheel of sea level rise as well as triggering the wheel of ocean acidification because the carbon dioxide is an acidic gas and as it dissolves into the sea it acidifies it. Leo Murray tackled this in his wicked animation: Wake up Freak out

And lastly, i promise i’ll move on after this one, temperature has a direct link to the global supplies of plankton (tiny microscopic insects that most fish feed off) which means that as soon as the plankton move to better conditions, the fish stocks move with them, that’s no mean feat when you consider over half of the species that live on the sea, live off plankton. Did you know that there’s 6 times more plastic than plankton floating around in the middle of the Pacific??

Back at home in West Wales old ladies insist on their mackerel every summer, and the town has taken to having a Mackerel Fest just like the Spanish have Sardine festivals to thank the mackerel for the season and invite them back for the next year. By the time Dad was finishing with fishing the season for catching mackerel was starting to change, so word on the street is that the mackerel are arriving later and leaving earlier and the stocks of fish that do come, are less.

The DEFRA report mentioned earlier stated that in general plankton in UK seas are moving northwards because it’s colder, and thus the fish that eat them go with them.

So, moving plankton means moving fish stocks and with it unhappy old ladies and years of tradition and useless fishing knowledge that gets passed down through the generations. No plankton at all signals a loss of biodiversity, extreme temperature rise and loss of income and traditions all together, far worse than mere migrations.

Now we turn to the birds and the bees.

I am sure you know full well that fish stocks can be put down to how much fish sex goes on. Just like when countries go to war and conscript all the young men in the country, there is not exactly a baby boom right after the war has finished because there are no men left for all the women.

So what if the overall numbers of fish are reducing so there are less to be able to mate? And what if humans had a penchant for rare products which spell d.e.a.t.h to fish because they simply strip the females of their eggs for us to consume? (Caviar)

Or what if we are just so greedy that have to binge on fish whatever the consequences, i.e. even if that means while we’ll have loads in our freezer now, we won’t have any in 2 years time, and our children will never know that that fish even existed because it has been fished to extinction?

It is rather an understatement to say that humans have not exactly facilitated mush fish sex in the last few years. On this subject the film ‘The end of the line’ is essential viewing; it is an incredible expose of what is actually going on behind all these UN treaties and EU regulations to prevent overfishing: that is despite quotas, promises, treaties and regulations these forums are actually facilitating the rapid raping of ALL the seas on this planet by legalising fishing quotas that are far too high to ensure the stabilisation of fish stocks let alone their regeneration to the numbers they were before they were overfished.

As many as 90% of all the ocean’s large fish (that means fish like cod, salmon and tuna) have been fished out; about 70% of our global fisheries are now being fished close to, already at, or beyond their capacity; and 52% of fish stocks are fully exploited.

Even scarier is UNEP’s findings that if we carry on as we are now, 100% of global fisheries stocks will collapse by 2050

As you will see in part 2, human reliance on fish is healthy and definitely necessary, just not at the current rate of consumption.

What does that even mean?

Put bluntly, if we are not stopped from over fishing or even just fishing stocks that are in decline, they will go extinct. Kapput. bye bye. no more.

This great calendar NEF put together shows how much fish a country eats versus how much is catches and works how quickly they go into ‘fish debt’ i.e how much they have to import.

The good news is that fish are forgiving creatures, it has also been shown that we could repopulate almost all of our seas if we had a mere 2 year ban on fishing for the worst affected places, and stringent quotas of how much can be fished in total shared out between each person fishing those waters. And just like any law, you have to check up on whether it’s being adhered to so there should be fish-police to enforce these measures every single day!

Coming soon is part 2 where I’ll cover the human side of the sea-what do we get out of it that could possibly make all this destruction worthwhile??

Every time I come home for the holidays, or for a special occasion, or just because I need to, mortality and the fragility of life seem to become more and more apparent. In the last year there have been family and friends deaths that have shocked, the bloodiest month of the war in Afghanistan, the sale of our family business, my God Mother turning 70, the culling of analogue TV (joke) and the death of legends such as Michael Jackson and John Dankworth.

I’m lucky to live in the same town as most of my close family, my Granny lives just next door. For as long as I’ve noticed she has been hailed as ‘remarkable’ for her age-still driving, still bright eyed and quick witted, still going on holiday, and still making jewellery at 93. I.e. she is still passing comment on what I wear with a designer’s eye, winking at…everyone, snorting into her whiskey etc.

We also have a pretty cool dog, a beautiful striped greyhound that always seemed to me to be able to run faster than a cheetah. We have had her since she was 2 years old, I was 11 when she joined the family. Now that I’ve reached 20, I can see her legs failing, her laps of the beach getting slower and fewer, and eyes going murky.

Just like the dog, every time I return home, Granny seems to take a step closer to death.

She no longer has ‘interesting conversation’ because all she wants to tell me about is this bruise and this ache and this pill and this life that she no longer wants for herself. Her tenacity to not wear beige like the rest of the retired population of this town has been transferred to threatening me with her walking off the harbour wall and beating the demons that haunt in her in her old age rather than feeding the aspects of her life that warded them off in the first place.

Would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

Would a trip to the other side of the world shroud her aches and pains in cultural diversity and distraction?

Would drinking herself to oblivion make her remember better times so as to override and smother the current ones?

Well apparently not.

I have suggested all of these things, and apart from the latter, which she has always done anyway (she doesn’t like water) the cons of her life always win over.

What is the psychology behind this? What are her motivations?

From the outside it is hard to see past how annoying it has become, your sympathy is marred by her selfishness in focusing on it, it should be easy to be frivolous, but if I put myself in her place I cannot think I would be much different. I’m sure, being a do-er, that I would feel like enjoying myself and throwing caution to the wind all the more if I could walk properly, if I could do it all without wincing in pain and having to drag a scarily purple leg around with me to see the sites of the world. To do it anyway requires a lot of money and a lot of organisation to make up for your lack of capacity; thus my efforts day in and day out to reduce that pain, to solve the problem, to replace my teeth, are all the efforts of a compos mentis human who still has pride in themselves, and still has the sense of self to be embarrassed by the slow unravelling of what you know about yourself, with the ultimate knowledge that death is the only outcome.

To desire to put it off, to remedy your ills so that you can enjoy life more, has got to be an indication that the capacity to enjoy life, and to hang onto it, remains within.

Recently I have noticed that countries of the world can suffer from this too. I hate to mention it so close to Granny (the other day she said to me “it’s all very well saving the planet but if you can’t save your Grandmother….”) but in the UNFCCC process, i.e. the UN Climate Change Negotiations, those countries who sit in plenary at the negotiations brazenly telling the world they are going under water or being starved to death by the climatic changes their country is facing betrays the same thinking as Granny.

Obviously every human knows that death is their final destination, and that it’s what comes in between now and death that counts. But, if you see death every day, in the colour of your leg, your teeth falling out, in the tides lapping on your doorstep, or the face of your child who you can’t feed because the crops have failed and it’s your only source of income, it is no longer an issue of deciding how to best use your in-between time, it is survival.

As the youth emphasised in Poznan in 2008, survival is not negotiable.

That fear of death, that reflex for survival is surely what drives the brazen pleas in plenary to commit to 350 parts per million, and agree on 1.5 degrees maximum temperature rise without compromise-it is not a matter of choice but necessity.

Similarly it is my lack of proximity to death that makes me unable to empathise with my Granny when she just doesn’t shut up (I am sympathetic though), and equally the Saudi Arabians who follow Tuvalu’s pleas for survival with excuses of loss of crops and profits from oil as a reason to commit comes down to a lack of empathy and concern because it is not happening to them. If they were fighting for survival, oil profits would be the least of their worries, but they are not.

Countries with the money to get themselves out of any fixes they come across, are the fully endowed frivolous people, they are the ones who no matter what nature throws at them, they believe they can throw money back at it in equal weight and see a solution without compromising anything of what they do.

The SIDS (Small Island Developing Nations) and African countries are those with immense national pride and culture but who are already seeing the worst effects of nature’s aging and unravelling, thus they are ones who need to reduce the pain, plug the gaps, and get help. They are the 93 year olds in this process, the ones who cannot consider frivolity until they have solved the ills that they already have, a lot of which happen to be caused by a changing climate.

The developed countries, who have the funds, and already feel the impacts of climate change, such as Australia and New Zealand are the 93 year olds who are the same as my Granny, but they have the money to throw at the situation, so that instead of changing their reality, they simply become frivolous to cover it up.

The developed countries who aren’t yet in that position, like the UK and most of Europe, are something like my God Mother who has just reached 70 and is, as of yet, vehemently without aches and ailments that need servicing, so she can be frivolous with her time and focus in any which way pleases her-after all, the pain isn’t imminent, it is merely something we all accept as a future possibility, and one which we could take vitamins for today, but really, are we convinced it will make the difference in the long term?

I draw two lessons from this; firstly that life is precious, in all its forms, in all its pains and in all its beauty. Secondly, it is this inspiration and pride in one’s life and lands that will keep international negotiations and agreements alive in the coming years.  As long as we have headstrong countries like Grenada and Tuvalu, Kenya and Bolivia clinging onto survival because they love their country and their life, we have a reason to negotiate.

To apply the question I ask of Granny, would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

I would answer no.

Frivolity in the face of death makes everything more acute.

When you know what the frivolity is masking, what it is really trying to achieve, rather than add pleasure to a dying life it creates an excuse for inaction, it is disturbing to witness and sickening to face because you know that death came unhindered and without fear of a challenge.

The day we give up on life and the future, the day we stop campaigning and lobbying our MP’s and Governments to solve the pains and ailments of our earth, is the day we become frivolous with ourselves and our children’s futures, and thanks to globalisation, this is not acceptable on more than a merely personal level because we are not only carving out a future for ourselves but a reality for the SIDS and African countries today.

3 days in and how are we feeling? How far have we got?

I cannot believe how tired I am when we have only been 3 days! We have been chasing people, and constantly trying to think of ways to get round the many obstacles that keep popping up, like Sam losing all his clothes; how can we make our FIG survey more accessible; does that question lead the interviewees; how can we get the delegates attention for 5 minutes….but I should be ashamed because essentially we are a delegation of 2, just like Barbados, just like the Democratic Republic of Congo and many others who have been here for 8 days of negotiating. They must be tired to the bone because they have to concentrate on minute details of text so boring you wouldn’t believe it was possible. The youth constituency’s focal points have been here the whole time too, facilitating the participation of youth in this process, and they are dog-tired from speaking to the police and the secretariat about youth actions, coordinating millions of meetings between youth and many important people, including the soon to be Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Christina Figures; the kind of tired that even the success of making youth campaign history in the negotiations can’t prevent.

Despite this however, we have collected over 10 completed surveys and are waiting to hear back from a mere 180 countries whose pigeon holes we have each stuck a survey in! We have emailed NGO members of the delegations to see if they can push their delegation to fill it out for us because NGO types tend to be more sympathetic to a fellow non-government person. Now the plan is to try to get ourselves some coverage by the paper bulletins that each delegate picks up every morning on their way in to get their fix of secondary commentary on the negotiations, wish us luck, it’s unlikely to happen!

All these things, coupled with the simple reality of these talks that I walk headlong into every time I come-that is that they dare not move in case they do actually save the planet-is pretty wearing. It is hard to convey to delegates that if they fill in our dry and boring survey, they could just be a bit better off in a years time.

The aim of FIG is that we collect all the evidence for the reason why we had to support delegations like Kiribati in Copenhagen in the first place. We offered our support unconditionally, i.e we would do whatever they asked, but the main thing they needed us for was taking minutes. It occurred to us that to be sending these minutes to only 1 delegation was highly inefficient when so many more delegations were/are in need of the same service.

But why should we fill the gap?

We say that minutes are a primary source of information that directly affects delegations negotiating positions, therefore, everyone should be able to access the same information by being able to read exactly who said what in all the negotiations. As it is the only minutes are webcasts that take hours to watch because it’s live streaming of the actual negotiations! Large delegations have civil servants to take notes in each session which they can use, but they don’t share them.

If everyone can see who said what, it means they can’t go back on what they said without it going unnoticed; new negotiators can see the history of decisions were adopted rather than the current system of identifying the proposal and the outcome-but nothing in between. I would have thought this was a basic requirement that the secretariat of the UN could fulfill which would improve the inequity of the process twofold:

1) small delegations could catch up with all the details of the meetings they couldn’t physically go to without having to watch the webcasts.

2) Those  same delegations could then participate more fully because they’re more likely to understand what’s going on and thus iron grip of the developed countries over this process may be slackened minutely…

I jump to conclusions though, our survey, which you can have a look at here, asks the delegates about gaps in information they experience, in all its forms, so we might be entirely wrong about the transcripts. We’ll just have to see.

Je ne comprend pas

Another pretty shocking thing we have noticed is that the banks of translation booths, which are normally left by the wayside in the smaller meeting rooms, have been empty even in the main plenary hall!

What’s that about eh?

Don’t worry we’re on the case, especially as many of the delegates we have surveyed already, mention that language does hamper their participation. C’mon UN please don’t fall apart just as the delegates might start to get their acts together!

Ever since our hopes of an international climate treaty burst into a ball of accord-tainted flames I have been wondering what it will be like on the corridors of the conference centre in the meetings after Copenhagen. I am curious to know what the mood between the delegates, especially between the north and south will feel like; how many delegates from each country will be attending; and the way the UN secretariat conducts itself.

The hopeful mood of the southern countries in Copenhagen disintegrated into anger aimed squarely at the northern countries who basically took their futures for a joy ride. Anote Tong, President of Kiribati, the small island nation we supported in COP15 said himself that he had started Copenhagen with a sense that the right thing would be done, because the world was watching. Yet come the end of the week when we all sat down to a commiseratory meal together, he could barely speak his anger and frustration ran so deep. It can be compared to a relationship turning sour and recriminatory at the end, where just to stay together becomes poisonous. Has the UNFCCC got to this point? Would it be poisonous to continue pinning hopes of tackling climate change on a multilateral international basis rather than saying enough is enough and every country pursuing bilateral relationships and agreements? Were the Southern countries let down so badly that they can never forgive, or will they live and let die if the developed and powerful countries start to engage humanely in the process and in the relationship? This week we will be testing the waters by roaming the corridors of the Maritim Hotel accosting delegates with a Dictaphone to get their views on how could the process be fairer and what would they need to participate in the negotiations more meaningfully (see FIG).

Sam touched on this before, but how will the Secretariat behave this time? Yvo De Boer, in his position as executive secretary of the UNFCCC Secretariat, is renowned for making clear his frustration with the lack of progress in talks, and encouraging delegates to work together and  be constructive in their comments, all under the restrictions of being a diplomat and having no actual power to change or speed up the process. Christina Figures, daughter of three-times President of Costa Rica, and a negotiator for South America herself, has worked on the Kyoto Protocol and knows the process inside out (unlike the Danish PM who failed miserably to grasp the art of diplomacy at the height of COP15); it will be very interesting to see how she copes with having only persuasive powers of speech at her fingertips, rather than actual measures she can impose on the parties. Apparently she is an accomplished public speaker, maybe she will mesmerise and empower the negotiators into action with her inspirational opening speeches….maybe she will immediately command everyone’s respect in the room due to her accomplishments, whatever the truth all eyes are on her to take this forward in a purposeful and meaningful way, especially as her interpretation of meaningful is likely to be the same as many developing countries ambitious positions, we could be in for an exciting ride. Its not just her new face which could excite the hard core UNers, there are many new chairs, most of whom are from developing countries, who are experiencing climate change right now. We’ve got Mama Konaté of Mali, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe of Zimbabwe, Ruleta Camacho of Antigua and Barbuda and Liana Bratasida of Indonesia. Some of whom were also in the running for the Christina’s position. So, we shall see what kind of leadership they bring in their chairing roles, and although we will never know, one wonders if they will let themselves be lobbied in private meetings with unsavoury private sector figures quite as much as their developed country alternative would. Only time will tell.