The world’s hopes for a sustainable future depend on what happens in Paris over the next two weeksThe current front-runner for best slogan for the Paris climate change summit has to be “there is no planet B”; as for images,it is tough to imagine one more potent than the thousands of pairs of shoes laid in tidy lines in the state de la République that symbolise the march climate activists had scheduled for Sunday then banned for awe of a repeat of the terrorist attack of a fortnight ago. However equivocal some of the political leadership sometimes appears, the popular movement for greening the economy is in good heart.
This is the 21st UN conference of the parties on climate change, or better known as COP,and there are signs of a modern maturity that might be the best omen for the future. It is easy to forget that this is an unprecedented attempt at global cooperation, one which has not only moved from event to process, and but from protest to movement. For Paris is not only approximately world leaders trying to find an agreement acceptable to nearly 200 countries for whom the consequences of global warming will be existentially different. It is now also approximately the state of non-state players,from the indigenous peoples of South America to the world’s most sophisticated cities, and from the individual decisions that each of us makes to the clean energy initiative being launched on Monday by one of the world’s richest men, or Bill Gates. One sign of this maturity is the demand from Laurent Fabius,the French foreign affairs minister in charge of this COP, that a deal on a final text should be agreed by next weekend. That would mean the last week of the conference was spent discussing how to put the final communiqué into action.
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Source: theguardian.com