COP 23 Day 4

Day 4: Thurs, Nov 9th, 2017

Photobooth at the German Pavillon

Ellie

Ari and I spent the morning touring around Cologne’s city center before finally hopping on the train. We visited a bakery for breakfast and then walked through the Cologne Cathedral.  

When we finally arrived at the conference there was some time to wander around the pavilion space. We took some pictures and drank good coffee at the Germany pavilion, and watched dancers at Fiji’s pavilion. In a far back corner of the space I found the Russian pavilion and began a very interesting conversation with one of the staff members. He congratulated the United States on finding a market solution to high carbon emissions through our increased natural gas usage. He says the Russians have been applying this value to their system of recycling. They have been able to greatly recycling of plastic and aluminum bottles by paying people to return them to recycling centers. While this system exists in the United States, it is far more effective in Russia, for he informed me that their European neighbors have begun to send bottles to their centers as well. All interesting facts that I will have to look into . . .

I then attended a talk held at the Indonesia pavilion titled Innovation in Mangrove Ecosystem Management to Support Community Livelihood and Climate Change Mitigation. This issue has been the focus of many studies done by the Center for International Agricultural Research. There is a really optimistic feeling in the region that mangrove trees can both mitigate the effects of rising sea levels and improve air quality. It is a tricky solution, however, as projects must be executed in areas that are compatible both socially and environmentally.

Next, I attended Nurturing Progress in Reducing Transnational Air Pollutants, held by the South Korean pavilion. The first speaker was involved in Korean foreign affairs, and adamantly stated that the solution to this issue relies on international cooperation. He was followed by Gerardo Sandez Martinez, a professor at DTU. Dr. Martinez stressed that climate change should have been viewed as a health concern from square one. Korea is an important illustration of this, for it experiences a high number of premature deaths due to air pollution. Health is high on the political agenda, and people tend to take it seriously. Most of the suggestions provided at this talk had to do with framing climate change as an issue relevant to the lives of all.

For my final event, I was back at the Indonesia pavillion for a talk about peatland restoration. The country has experienced a bilateral approach to peatland protection and monitoring. Both market interests in the private sector, as well as international NGO’s have taken an interest in this. There remains large needs, such as research into possible sustainable livelihoods within peatlands and further data collection into peatland mapping, however, this is another topic that the climate mitigation community is extremely excited about. I noticed, however, that there was very little government action involved in the monitoring and preservation of Indonesian peatlands. It is sad to see the production of such a large COP23 pavillion, with little action to back it up.

Ari

I started the conference part of my day by attending a talk in the Cities and Regions Pavilion. The talk was centered around the connection between the Paris Agreement, national governments, and local governments. The panel included two Mayors, one from a town in Botswana and the other from a town in South Africa. In addition, there was a man who served in the national level government in Cote d’Ivoire. The mayors discussed the fact that nations present the Paris Agreement as a good framework, but it is most effectively actualized at the local scale. From here, the mayoral panelists talked about sustainable initiatives that they had implemented in their towns, including bettering rapid transit systems, creating infastructure to transition to renewables, and developing higher quality recycling centers. The man from Cote d’Ivoire supported the mayors and added that national government should provide the framework and help with implementation, but that they should be executed bottom-up, not top-down. In addition, he emphasized the need to grow the economy without increasing emissions. I’ve been having a bit of a hard time with this type of dialogue at COP because the more that I read about economic growth, the more that I believe it is fundamentally in opposition to a healthy and liveable environment, but this is the system we live in, and I guess that it’s better that we try to focus on decreasing emissions, than the other option.