AQUA is showing tonight in the Pumphaus, the film of the Great Barrier Reef, 'a chronicle of a world in peril'. I'm hoping a few Australians from our delegation will come and show support, especially as quite a few of us now have limited access to the formal negotiations.
Yesterday I went to the Bella Centre twice, once to meet IRENA, the international renewable energy association, and attend the daily meeting of the Climate Action Network-International, seen here voting on which parties should receive a Fossil Award.
Came back later and stayed until 2am, gaining real insight into timeframes and processes, meeting Drew Clark from the Australian delegation at the Ad Hoc Working Group on Longterm Cooperative Action under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - progress is slow and the developing world is committed to pushing through for binding practical commitments to support those hardest hit and least able to cope with the impacts of climate change. Revised texts finally arrived and negotiations got underway again, simultaneously translated into many languages.
The intensity of these negotiations was put in perspective by my morning hearing testimonies from several ministers of religion who took part in Copenhagen Cathedral. One quoted Martin Luther King's 1963 "The Fierce Urgency of Now".. Professor Mugambe of Kenya described the biogeography of the African continuent, where 40 million people share the only 20% of the continent with decent rainfall and spoke of the potential for freshwater to eradicate poverty. In his view, we have science and technology in plenty - what we need is to awaken our ethics and spirituality and work with the people on the ground who know their situation best. He had a wonderful example of communities in the Nile River Basin who built 500 little weirs in dry river beds to catch the infrequent deluges (now falling in torrents in 2 weeks rather than over a 3-4 month period) to water sorghum where maize no longer survives the heat.
In between I went to the Klimaforum .. coinciding with the President of the Maldives looking at photos of endangered islands ... met Navajo women working to develop clean jobs and protect their communities...
and enjoyed snow outside the Bella, where I met some Bolivians from Lake Titicaca .. 
and heard a bit of Arnold Schwarznegger outside the US Pavilion where the USDA displays its views...
It's hard to be bored around here...
Philippa
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