Chez Rémi

Yes we want?

2012-01-11T14:54:00.022+01:00

The Secretariat of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) has uploaded last night the long awaited “zero draft” of the conference's outcome document. Also known as the Rio+20 conference, the UNCSD will take place in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. The Zero Draft forms the basis for further negotiations. I'll be at what the UN jargon calls an informal informal this month, 25-27 January in New York (there will be several more before everyone meets in Rio in June). The most immediate question is whether this Zero Draft will be decaffeinated in the search for consensus (the race to the lowest common denominator) or whether on the contrary it will be spiced up.

I'm hearing some people and governments already saying that the 19-page document is "too long". I don't really think that's a problem, and to be fair the Secretariat had a tough job turning into a concise document the six thousand pages submitted on 1st November by 677governments, international organizations, regional and political groups, and NGOs. Inevitably a lot of these contributors are already getting the feeling that their issue(s) and proposals have not been given a fair hearing or have been left aside, so it's likely that at least initially the successive drafts increase in size.

More than the document itself and its size, let's look where it's leading us to. It is proposed that Rio+20 sets the stage for several new forward-looking initiatives: an international knowledge-sharing platform to facilitate countries' green economy policy design and implementation (paragraph 33); a roadmap to implement and assess progress between 2015 and 2030, with a development phase between 2012 and 2015 (paragraph 43); the reform of the CSD, the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development (paragraph 49) or if possible its transformation into a Sustainable Development Council (paragraph 49 alt.); the strengthening of UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme (paragraph 51) or if possible its transformation into a UN specialized agency for the environment supported by stable, adequate and predictable financial contributions and operating on an equal footing with other UN specialized agencies (paragraph 51alt.); a regular UN Secretary General review of the state of the planet and the Earth's carrying capacity (paragraph 52); consideration of the establishment of a Obudsperson or High Commissioner for Future Generations to promote sustainable development (paragraph 57); negotiation as soon as possible of an implementing agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to address the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodioversity in the high seas (paragraph 80); a 10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production (paragraph 97); the launch by 2015 of a set of global Sustainable Development Goals built from the experience of the UN Millennium Development Goals campaign, with a mechanism for periodic review (paragraphs 105-109); and (last but perhaps not least) the development and strengthening of indicators complementing Gross Domestic Products to integrate economic, social and environmental dimensions in a balanced manner (paragraph 111). The document also identifies a set of priority thematic and cross-sectoral issues and areas including food security; water; energy; cities; green jobs; oceans and small island developing states; natural disasters; climate change; forests biodiversity, land degradation and desertification; mountains; chemicals and waste; education; and gender equality (paragraphs 63 to 104). It also tries to address some of the impacts of international trade on substainability (paragraphs 124-127), and attempts to set up an accountability framework for voluntary partnerships in order to correct one of the shortfalls from the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development ten years ago (paragraph 128).

The document's title is "The Future we Want." At the end of the process we'll know if this is what we want (what the world needs). In four years we've moved from "yes we can" to "yes we want". But if we all want it, I'm sure we can.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUI) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

Snapshot

2011-11-20T17:14:00.002+01:00

It is too early to say whether the next UN "Earth Summit" in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20) will be a success. But the official Rio+20 website now offers an interesting and useful snapshot of the expectations, perspectives, hopes and proposals of large segments of the international community.

In March, 2011, the second session of the Preparatory Committee of the Rio+20 Conference decided that governments, international agencies and "majors groups" (organizations representing all walks of "civil society") would have until 1st November to send to the UN their proposals for Rio+20. These would be included in a "compilation document" to be presented mid December, to form the basis of a "zero draft" document to be discussed at an intersessional meeting mid January in New York. Based on comments received on the "zero draft", a "first draft" of the conference's outcome document will be produced, and second, a third, etc. every month until the summit proper takes place in Rio at the end of June. (Click here to see the current schedule of meetings)

To date 642 submissions are available on the UN website: 73 from governments, 4 from political groups, 4 from regional groups, 493 from civil society organizations (including private sector organizations), and 68 from UN agencies and other intergovernmental organizations. The UN Secretariat has done a good job coping with a massive snowfall of submissions received in the days preceding the 1st of November deadline. They've included a search engine to help navigate with keywords into the numerous submissions.

Before this material is trimmed by the UN negotiating process and disappears from the website, it might be a good idea to save on a hard disk this wish list of the international community. For the record.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

McFish

2011-10-06T11:55:00.007+02:00

I've just read on the BBC website that McDonald's restaurants have announced that they will be "serving" MSC-certified fish in Europe.

This reminds me of a dinner I was at in Geneva about 12 years ago, organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Fish was the main dish on the menu, and, sitted on my left a Vice-President of McDonald's asked me "How is this fish called? It's very tasty." Half-jokingly only, I responded: "I won't tell you, because otherwise there won't be any left within a few months!"

The man did not seem to catch what I was telling him. Perhaps he would now, a decade later. I'm curious to see what this partnership between the MSC and McDonald's will mean to the future of both the MSC and McDonald's. And to the future of fish.

Golden rule for a planet

2011-09-27T23:59:00.006+02:00

Today is Earth Overshoot Day according to calculations by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and the Global Footprint Network (GFN). This means that in the first nine months of this year Humanity has surpassed its natural budget for the year (well, those who like me, and probably you also have access to abundance) . From today and for the rest of the year we will now operate in overdraft, borrowing (stealing) resources from the future.

I can't help wondering what future generations will think of us when they hear of the sharp contrast between the lightness with which we spend our (their) natural capital and destroy our (their) natural assets, and the frenzy with which neo-liberal economists are aggressively campaigning to restrict the expenditures of public administrations to the level of their incomes. Neo-liberal economists call this the Golden Rule and say it's their recipe to save financial markets and services. But shouldn't we develop instead a different kind of Golden Rule, to save the natural wealth, preserving the services of nature, ecosystems, biodiversity and clean air and water?

A few months ago, in his blog Richard Black of the BBC wondered if anyone had "a big idea" to make the upcoming Rio+20 Conference in June, 2012 a success. And now I hear many people say that with the current financial uncertainties, political leaders have no apetite for another environmental summit. Well, I don't know if it's "a big idea", but -- if the word deficit is the only thing that wakes up political leaders and the markets -- why don't we start designing a Golden Rule to prevent us from being in deficit with nature for a change? And call for its establishment in Rio.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUI) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

Dignity

2011-07-29T01:33:00.000+02:00

I took this photo this evening at Madrid's Puerta del Sol, the epicenter in the last two months of the youth revolt against a political class that has lost values and is largely corrupt in a variety of ways.

Like any youth mass movement, this one has its own challenges to face. But there is little doubt already that it will be the hallmark of a generation. Here in Spain, and maybe elsewhere too.

The odds that I ever have another daughter again are very slim to say the least. But if I ever had one I'm thinking that I could call her Dignidad. Not Esperanza. [Spanish readers will know why]

Tokyo Ginza's most cherished treasure

2011-07-21T02:44:00.009+02:00

My immersion in the world of Japan's honeybee colonies and the challenges of their conservation ended yesterday with a visit to a honeybees farm located on top of a building in Ginza, Tokyo's equivalent of New York's Fifth Avenue.

Ginpachi, the Ginza Honey Bee Initiative on the terrace of a fourteenth floor building on Ginza Chuo-ku is ran by an NGO that seeks to educate people to the importance of protecting bees. The Ginza district is famous worldwide for hosting Tokyo's highest concentration of wealth and luxury items, with international fashion and design retail shops, fancy restaurants and expensive department stores everywhere. The natural wealth cherished by the beekeepers in the middle of so much artificial wealth is a striking and inspiring contrast. With nine colonies of European bees (40,000 bees per colony; European bees were introduced in Japan in the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century) and eight colonies of Japanese bees (10,000 bees per colony), Ginpachi produces per year approximately 1.7 ton of honey which is used and sold in the pastries section of the nearby Matsuya Department Store in support of the project. Ran by fifty people, the project started in 2006 and gets visitors almost every day. The honey from Japanese bees is very tasty, but their production is 20% less than European bees'.

My main reason for coming to Japan this month was to give my two-day advocacy teach-in course to a group of Japanese farmers, beekeepers and environmentalists to help them, at their request, develop a strategic framework for their campaign against the use of neonicotinoid, the pesticide which is thought to devastate honeybee colonies. Over the years, I've given my advocacy teach-in course in the various languages that I speak and on various continents, adapting it to the needs, objectives and focus of the very diverse organizations who've contracted me for it. But -- although I've travelled frequently to Tokyo in the last few years -- adapting it to the cultural circumstances of Japan was a good challenge and I'm glad the participants' feedback was excellent.

Before I worked on this project, I was of course already aware that several issues were causing honeybee colonies collapse disorders worldwide, and that it could become a severe food security and biodiversity conservation issue worldwide, because of the important pollination function of bees in nature. During my preparations, I found out that the statement attributed to Albert Einstein that if honeybees disappear from our planet humans will disappear four years later is a mysterious urban legend, apparently. But, still, it's a good one.

Energy in Japan

2011-07-19T17:29:00.007+02:00

Let’s start with a good news from Fukushima…After several days in Japan, as I was telling my friend Miyuki Nakagawa this afternoon that I thought the seasonal heat in Tokyo was not as torrid as one year ago, she gave me an interesting explanation: that's because there's less hot air discharged from the city’s buildings as a result of the current restrictions on the use of air conditioning in Japan prompted by the post-Fukushima electricity supply crisis. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that before? Miyuki says that she even noticed in her neighbourhood that the air cools off every night; she can actually open her bedroom window in the night this year and enjoy some fresh air, whereas in the past she had to switch on the air conditioning to manage to sleep.

I asked Miyuki if the general public had drawn the same lesson (that conventional air conditioning is having a boomerang effect on our well-being), but she wasn’t sure. From the minute you land, at Narita airport and whenever you travel in the metro, you find posters everywhere apologizing for the absence of air conditioning and telling people it's to save energy. Okay, everyone knows that Japanese people have a tendency to apologize for next to anything, but in this instance it would be smart to emphasize the positive side of the air conditioning shutdown.

My friend Jun Hoshikawa, a veteran social and environmental activist and author, told me the other day that there is a fairly widespread suspicion that the negative “you must save energy” messaging is part of a deliberate strategy of pro-nuclear interests. The idea is that, with some 36 nuclear reactors stopped across the country and an unpopular Prime Minister calling for a nuclear-free future and a renewables-based economic vision, tired workers sweating in the metro on their way home hit by “save energy” messages at every step are subliminally being told to blame their problem on the closure of the nuclear power plants, not on the industry’s lack of safety.

[I've also read in Japan Times yesterday that heatstrokes among elders have quadrupled this summer]

Against this background, what’s the story behind Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s call for nuclear-free Japan last week? Public opinion polls show that approximately 70% of the population are now in favour of closing down all nuclear power in the country. At the same time, Kan is currently enjoying the lowest possible acceptance rate a leader can imagine in his worst nightmares (no more than 12% to 15% of the Japanese voters support him), and he knows that it’s not going to get any better for him (at least not significantly) in the foreseeable future. Kan hasn’t got anything to lose now, and with no or very little prospect of being re-elected (he could even face a mutiny within his own party at any time), the only thing that counts for him is the long term, his mark in History. Thus with his call for the closure of the nuclear industry, not only has Kan nothing to lose, he’s also got everything to win: if the renewable energy REvolution he’s calling for does take place, he’ll be remembered as the great visionary leader who’s put the country on the right path at a moment of great crisis crisis and sorrow; if the REvolution does not place and the nuclear industry makes a comeback instead, he knows that sooner or later (when there is another nuclear accident, or when the leading economies of the world will be the ones who did their REvolution) people will be sorry for not having listened to him and then again he’ll be remembered as someone with a great vision. Either way, he’ll win. Add to this the fact that Kan is the guy who signs every day the cheques to pay for the many hundred billions of Yens the Fukushima tragedy is costing to ordinary taxpayers and preventing the government from doing the things it was elected to do, and here’s why Prime Minister Kan is turning into an anti-nuclear activist (and others like Angela Merkel too).

[Remember that the nuclear industry’s liability is limited to ridiculously small amounts, because otherwise no-one would invest in it: the industry collects the benefits for itself but passes the costs to the rest of society.]

The Keidanren, the big and powerful Japanese Business Federation and the mainstream Japanese media are trying to get the Prime Minister out as soon as they can. For now, Kan is trying to resist, at least until the Diet meets in session again at the end of August with three important bills on the table: two bills on Fukushima recovery, and a new bill on Renewables feeding tariffs to speed up the clean energy REvolution. Despite the odds, the Prime Minister isn’t alone. The richest man in Japan for example, Masayshi Son, a Japanese telecom tycoon CEO of Softbank, very popular all over the country for representing the archetype of successful self-made entrepreneur Japanese people love, has started to bid for the renewable energy REvolution. Masayoshi Son and Softbank are now conducting large humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in the Fukushima area, especially for children, including 10 Billion Yens in donations to the victims and local NGOs. Son is developing his new renewables business line fast, and is gathering political support for it: apart from the Prime Minister, out of the 47 prefectures (Japanese local governments), he’s already got the support of 35 prefectures for Softbank’s new renewables projects consisting in developing “mega-solar projects” and wind parks in unused or underused lands and a smart grid electricity transmission and distribution system.

The recent Global Renewables Status Report of REN21, the global renewable energy policy network, shows how well REvolution is underway now. In 2010, renewable energy supplied an estimated 16% of global final energy consumption and delivered close to 20% of global electricity; renewable capacity now comprises about a quarter of total global power-generating capacity. And if the Japanese want to take a lead, with their great creativity and engineering skills, things will speed up even faster.

Safe(r) ?

2011-07-09T12:17:00.004+02:00

I've just read in Le Monde an interview with the former President of the French nuclear giant AREVA, Anne Lauvergeon who was defenestrated by President Sarkozy a few days ago.

As you would expect, Ms. Lauvergeon defends her performance during her ten-year tenure at the helm of the State controlled company involved in every stage of the nuclear cycle, from uranium mining and enrichment, nuclear power plant design and manufacture, to spent fuel reprocessing and radioactive waste management and transport, nuclear weapon-grade plutonium production, etc.

But there is one thing that strikes me at the end end of the article: in defence of AREVA's costly EPR nuclear reactor (marketed as "third generation" reactor), Anne Lauvergeon says "we're heading towards a safer nuclear industry".

I find this statement amazing. Since 1978 (when the first shipment of nuclear spent fuel from Japan travelled by sea to La Hague's nuclear reprocessing plant in Northern France, and I was there to "welcome" it with the Rainbow Warrior), I've been dealing in various stages of my life with AREVA (previously called COGEMA). And during these three decades they have always maintained that their techology and operations were "absolutely safe".

To be safe is very much like being pregnant, I thought: you can't be half pregnant, you are or you aren't. You can't be half safe, you are or you aren't. So, what up? Tell us more Madame Lauvergeon.

Ai Weiwei

2011-06-24T21:46:00.006+02:00

I've just been wondering what would happen if suddenly we all stopped saying "hello", "bonjour", "buenos días", "مرحبا", "bom-dia", "你好", "goedendag", "здравствуйте", "guten Tag", "こんにちは" or سلام, and we all said Ai Weiwei instead.

What do you think would happen?

Enabling policies 2012

2011-05-11T12:16:00.004+02:00

I'm thinking that maybe I should remove from this blog's portal the old photo on top of the right-hand column with me in front of my solar panels. When I first installed 11 years ago my 36 photovoltaic solar panels and got them connected to the grid, most people thought it looked almost like science fiction. At first sight, people said wow -- what's that stuff that looks like a piece of the space station? It was real pioneering stuff at the time. Getting connected to the grid was such a novelty then that the Regional Government's Director General of Energy came to visit to understand how that worked (I think I was the second physical person getting connected in the whole of Spain, and the first one in Castilla).

But now maybe I should replace the old photo by this new one that illustrates this post, where I'm pausing alongside a huge wind turbine vane. Solar and wind farms are common place in Spain now, and more electricity is produced by renewables than by nuclear power. Whenever I travel through Spain, I'm impressed by the number and size of solar and wind farms virtually everywhere, and my own old solar installation looks tiny now. Presently, no-one is surprised anymore to see special convoys carrying huge wind turbine vanes on trucks throughout the peninsula. This frenzy shows how the wind business is buzzing, despite controversies for the changing mind of the Spanish Government about the fiscal regime awarded to Renewables. Hence I was glad two weeks ago to have the opportunty on the road to stop and jump on a truck, and pause for this cool photo shot that illustrates, I think, the power of wind power (built in Aragon, these vanes were on their way to the Atlantic harbour of Ferrol to shipped for export, the truck drivers told me).

Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced the release of their 900-page Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources (SRREN). I did not read the entire document, but I've read today the 25-page Summary for Policy-Makers. The main message of the report is that close to 80% of the world’s energy supply could be met by Renewables by 2050 if backed by the right enabling public policies. WWF said they wish the report had said 100% and I won’t dispute this. But – as Greenpeace said the report is “an invitation to governments to initiate a radical overhaul of their policies and place renewable energy centre stage,” and this is good.

The IPCC report comes out little more than six months before the start of the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All, according to a decision by the United Nations General Assembly. And of course also we have little more than a year before the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the so-called Rio+20 in June, 2012. Could this be a good opportunity to set in stone the right enabling public policies the IPCC, Greenpeace, WWF and others are calling for?

ゲルニカ

2011-04-20T00:12:00.010+02:00

The title of this post, ゲルニカ reads "Guernica" in Japanese.

Next Tuesday 26 of April will mark both (in chronological order) the 74th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica in the Basque Country by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War (26 April, 1937) and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine (26 April, 1986). Of course it will also take place on the 57th day of the on-going Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.

I've been wondering for a long time why there is no equivalent of Picasso's Guernica for Chernobyl. Is it because we are swamped with too many images in the contemporary world, so we don't even notice? I've also been asking myself if someone will ever produce a Guernica of climate change. What would it need to be noticed above the background noise? And of course now I'd like to know if someone is locked somewhere, in Tokyo, Osaka, anywhere else in Japan or the world, producing furiously the Guernica of Fukushima. Takashi Murakami, maybe?

The photo illustrating this post was not taken in front of the original Guernica, which has been in Madrid since 1981. It was taken (a dozen years ago as you can see from the hair on my head) in NewYork in front of the tapestry copy of Guernica authorized by Picasso and donated by Nelson Rockefeller to the United Nations. Normally (that is, not during the current massive UN building refurbishment operation that started a few months ago) it stands outside the UN Security Council, facing its members when they go in to make important decision, and facing them again when they go out after decisions are taken -- good ones and bad ones. Guernica's tapestry copy has never prevented bad decisions (or coward absence of decision) by the UN Security Council. But its presence was found so troubling that the Bush administration sought its removal in 2003 during the infamous sessions where they sought authorization for their war on Iraq. If there was a Guernica of Fukushima it would be a good idea to offer it, for example, to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. For example.

Grand Pa' !

2011-04-08T00:41:00.004+02:00

I've just had a framed copy made of the poster of the Hub campaign featuring me hugging a bluefin tuna, which has been displayed on Madrid bus-stops for three weeks.

As you can see on the photo above, this thing is taller than me (in other words, it is i-m-m-e-n-s-e), so I'm not exactly sure where I can put it at home or in my office.

But the reason I want to keep a copy is that I can imagine, if I ever become a grand-father (I suppose that technically it could happen any Saturday night, though I'm not encouraging it), this immense photo would strike forever my grand-children's memory and imagination. Most importantly, the great slogan on the poster "¿Te quejas o emprendes?" ("Keep complaining, or take action!") could make a real difference to their upbringing, to their lives, and maybe to the lives of many others too.

I do not feel an urge to become a grand-father. But I'm already trying to be a good one.

From Fukuyama to Fukushima

2011-04-04T16:51:00.003+02:00

The great French sociologist Edgar Morin opens his new book, “La Voie” (The Way) which I’m reading this week with this quote from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset: “We don’t know what’s happening, and that’s what’s happening”.

“There is always some distance between events and the awareness of their significance”, says Morin.

We don’t know what’s happening and this is what’s happening in Fukishima?

We were told at school that the XXth Century started in 1914, with the First World War. Now I’m wondering whether my grand children will be told that the XXIst Century started on 11 March, 2011 with the accident at fukushima, whose four damaged nuclear reactors continue to spill radioactive wastes in the atmosphere, the sea and the subsoil for the last three weeks. I hope that Fukushima is remembered as the beginning of the century, because this would mean that we’ll have learnt the lesson. That we’ll have truly begun to move into the green economy, that we’ve given up producing so much energy to waste it. That there is a green future, based on renewable energy.

There’s in some way a replica of the Japanese earthquake in France, the country with the greatest density of nuclear plants together with Japan. I’ve just spent a week in Paris where there’s a new air when you speak about the future of the nuclear industry, even with people with vested interests in the nuclear sector. Discussing the risks of nuclear power is no longer taboo. And everyone suspects that the urge of Nicolas Sarkozy to get his photo opportunity with Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan in Tokyo last week had little to do with the solidarity of the current Chair of the G20, and a lot with the anxiety of the President of the French Republic not to lose the largest foreign client of AREVA, the French nuclear giant (by the way, do you know where was manufactured the MOX fuel – mixture of uranium and plutonium – that Fukushima Reactor 3 has been vomiting for three weeks?)

Ten years ago Francis Fukuyama, a US thinker of Japanese origin made headlines with his theory on the end of History. Fukushima is a good opportunity to remember that Fukuyama got it wrong.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

Before Japan's reconstruction

2011-03-21T11:29:00.007+01:00

I couldn’t get Japan’s nuclear nightmare off my brain all last week. Every morning I woke up with it, every evening I went to sleep with it. It was only on Thursday that I realized that what I was experiencing was exactly like when I mourn the death of a relative or a friend. Even if all my personal friends and colleagues in Japan have told me that they’re “well”.

My colleague Kelly Rigg notes that an unprecedented number of people (6230 by Sunday afternoon) have clicked “like” on her Huffington Post piece of last Friday with a great message of hope (that – unlike the Fukushima nuclear reactors -- the wind farms in the areas worst hit by the earthquake and tsunami had resisted and were producing some of the much needed electricity in the region). I suppose Kelly's piece went viral more than any other because as we were millions experiencing the same sadness last week, we all welcomed a story with a positive spin because we all needed a bit of warmth to compensate.

Now, after reading that Prime Minister Naoto Kan said that his country will need to be “rebuilt from scratch”, I wonder if Japan will seize the chance to become the champion of the emerging green economy, as it needs to re-invent itself again. Hopefully, the story of the wind farms resisting the earthquake and the tsunami will act as a strong incentive.

I have a strong memory of my visit at an amazing “Eco-product” fair in Tokyo in December, 2009. I had mixed feelings when I came out of this annual event that gathers close to 200,000 professionals and where hundreds of brands (including all the Japanese flagship corporations like Sanyo, Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Sharp, etc.) display all sorts of innovative products which purport to enhance a sustainable lifestyle.

I discovered there many interesting energy efficient products,sustainable architecture devices and design propositions, creative renewable energy applications, and numerous tools and gear designed to support sustainable mobility (hybrid trucks, cars roofed with photovoltaic cells, electric bicycles, etc.) but what impressed me the most was the buzz and expectation around all this. On the other hand, I came out wondering why a great number of these products were on display-only, why corporations were keeping them in their drawers, and I asked myself when they would become available on the market. Generally however, I came out enthused and convinced that Japanese firms were making big efforts to position themselves for the green economy, investing considerable amounts of resources to look for responses to environmental challenges. My impression was that what they were showing at the Tokyo “Eco-product” fair was only the tip of the iceberg, that they must have had a lot of unpublicized projects in their back pockets. I thought that the corporations with the best propositions would get ahead of the curve in the race for the green economy when and if they’d decide to implement them seriously.

[I also remember a number of typical trivial “greenwash” items at the fair, such as for example a small heater powered by an “efficient reusable battery” to hold in your hands outdoor in the cold; when I told the charming young hostess on the Sanyo stand that I knew of a better eco-product called “gloves” to heat my hands, she did not know what to say]

After Fukushima, the definition and meaning of expressions like “low carbon footprint” and “low carbon economy” that were common at the “Eco Product” fair will need to change in Japan and elsewhere. Like in France, these expressions in Japan have been largely used as a synonym for “nuclear power”. “Eco-friendly product” is another one that needs to conform to actual societal and individual needs, not trivial consumerism.

Let’s hope the Japanese people will put their fertile and creative minds to work, and take advantage of the crisis to accelerate the greening of their economy. And of the rest of the world.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

Earthquake in Vienna!

2011-03-12T21:10:00.006+01:00

As a frequent visitor of Japan, my thoughts in the last day and a half have been with all my friends and colleagues there. I'd like to also add to the flurry of thoughts and commentaries I see on the Internet, about the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

In cooperation with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Government of Ukraine has been planning a major international conference in Kiev next month, on 20-22 April to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion (26 April, 1986). According to the announcement, together with President Viktor Yanukovich of Ukraine, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso and numerous other luminaries will be there.

The Fukushima explosion will have had the effect of an Earthquake at IAEA Vienna Headquarters, for the team in charge of the Chernobyl+25 commemoration next month and for the rest of the staff. And of course the current Director General of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano of Japan will be very concerned personally, let alone professionally by the Fukushima tragedy. Mr. Amano took office as IAEA DG less than a year and a half ago, and he hasn't yet had the opportunity to make his mark on the agency. Unlike his predecessors Mohamed el-Baradei and Hans Blix, Mr. Amano hasn't got much of a public profile until now.

I'm wondering whether next month's Chernobyl+25 year (and Fukushima+1 month) commemoration in Kiev would be the place, and the time, to discuss the need to review and amend Article II of the IAEA statute. Written in 1957, Article II sets the objective of the agency as "seek[ing] to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world [...]." In its history, the IAEA has often been accused of covering up misconducts and risky behaviours by nuclear power plant operators. It has also undermined proposals and efforts to increase nuclear safety and radioprotection worldwide. It has been suggested many times that Article II of its statute had a lot to do with the IAEA's lenient culture towards nuclear safety, simply because it is difficult to promote and regulate at the same time an industrial sector (the fox in the chicken coop, so to speak).

As so many nuclear power installations built in the 1970s and 1980s are aging, and as we hear voices talking (until this week-end) of a nuclear revival, wouldn't it be a good idea to strengthen the IAEA through a reform of its statute?

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

The guy with the fish

2011-03-08T15:49:00.001+01:00

If you're in Madrid this week and next, you may run into this poster displayed on bus stops by the City of Madrid as part of a promotional campaign for the Hub-Madrid, the club of social entrepreneurs to which I belong.

Very cool. The managers at the Hub know that I was a bit hesitant when they first said they wanted to feature me in their campaign. But now I'm glad I'm there (together with Conchita Galdón of Puentes Globales and Germán Argüelles of Inspirasports). I like the tag on the poster, "¿Te quejas o emprendes?" which can best translate as "Keep complaining, or take acion!"

I'm also glad I'm in New York this week, at the 2nd session of the Preparatory Committee for the Rio+20 2012 Conference. At least for now, I don't know if anyone will say "Eh, the guy with the fish!" next time I go into a tapas bar after I return home.

Don't take that train

2011-03-01T23:07:00.002+01:00

I found a copy of this week's Time Magazine in the EUROSTAR train between London and Brussels this morning, and read their two-page story "Nuclear Batteries: Tiny reactors have energized the nuclear industry. Can they help save the planet?"

The story is about a US firm, Hyperion described as "a spin-off of the Los Alamos National Laboratory", which says they'll soon be ready to build 25 megawatt atomic reactors "about the size of a refrigerator [...] designed to power subdivisions or towns with fewer than 20,000 homes, as well as military bases, mining operations, desalination plants and even commercial ships, including cruise liners." The battery is "not quite compact enough for cars", but the story suggests that it's part of the business plan: "Think of us as the iPhone of nuclear reactors; there are many exciting applications", says Hyperion's CEO John Deal.

Time Magazine also says that "the nuclear battery is so small, it can be transported on the back of a truck." However the use of the present tense appears to be abusive, because the product only exists on paper. Time Magazine also says that because the product is unlikely to meet US legislation requirements, Hyperion is seeking to build and market it abroad, suggesting that what is envisaged is another case of hazardous technology tested on countries with weaker regulatory systems, less accountability mechanisms, and/or less transparency. In many ways, Hyperion's project is the same kind of things post-soviet nuclear scientists have got us used to, like the floating nuclear reactors currently under construction in Russian shipyards. When the floating nuclear reactors started to be discussed and promoted in Russia, at the turn of the century, no-one (or very few people) took it seriously. Most people thought that it was likely that it was the product of the fertile imagination of a consortium of research institutes who had found nothing better to attract public subsidies and rip off Russian taxpayers with plans that would never see the light. But this was ignoring that when public and/or private funds are poured into a project, vested interests are created and the longer it takes for civil society to wake up and ask questions, the more it becomes difficult to stop -- regardless of whether the project is useless, uneconomic, or frankly dangerous for the environment or human health.

As I was in a train this morning, I could not help making a parallel with a Russian nuclear powered train project I read about last week. The Vice-president of Russian Railways (RZhD), Valentin Gapanovich has announced that they will present at the end of this year the layout of a train consisting of eleven wagons powered by a small fast breeder reactor.

Until now, the only mobile nuclear reactors that have been in operation have been on board nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, plus a handful of former Soviet nuclear ice-breakers. I don't like them, but at least these have been manned and control by disciplined military (and armed) personnel. In contrast, the thought of countries, including private enterprises, competing to sell as many civilian mobile applications as they can as they can (on wheels, at sea and -- who knows? -- maybe even in the air) is very scary.

Don't take that train.

Of saving whales and saving…face

2011-02-18T19:21:00.009+01:00

For the past five years I’ve been involved with a fairly large group of NGOs and governments that sought to find a negotiated solution to the long standing political impasse at the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Although there has been a moratorium on commercial whaling since 1986 and the Southern Ocean was declared a whale sanctuary in 1994, the Government of Japan has been adamant that it had the right under the IWC constitution to continue to kill whales under the guise of scientific research. A costly and time-consuming so-called “whale peace process” took place for three years under the aegis of the IWC, until it broke down at last year’s IWC annual meeting held in Agadir, Morocco.

The “whale peace process” had been established in response to pledges by the Fisheries Agency of Japan that it needed political space to save face, because according to them part of the problem was what they described as an over-simplified and unfair representation of the whaling issue in the Western world. The whale peace process did not bear fruit because consensus was difficult among governments and NGOs alike. But it served to reach out – both formally and informally – to higher levels within the Japanese Government, beyond the Fisheries Agency whose officials have been suspected for a long time of having conflicts of interest. Members of the Cabinet of the last four Japanese Prime Ministers became involved, but they seemed to maintain a line that was not very different from the Fisheries Agency’s: over-simplification of the whaling issue was not helpful and anti-whaling sentiments expressed in the West were often counter-productive because they were perceived as humiliating or even racist, when instead the international community should help the Government of Japan find a face-saving solution, they said. As was recently made public in documents released by Wikileaks, one condition Japan has reiterated time and time again was that a broad international condemnation of the tactics used by the Sea Shepherd activist group was necessary to help Japan move in the right direction because they could not afford being seen to be giving in to a group which they’ve repeatedly described as a terrorist organization. In the last several years, at every meeting of the IWC, Japan has introduced an agenda item called “safety at sea” which generally takes an entire afternoon of the Commission’s work during which they describe (with video footage and power point presentations) what they consider to be Sea Shepherd violence against their ships and crews, in violation of international rules of good seamanship. And in response each time, virtually every single State member of the IWC has responded publically by condemning the Sea Shepherd, and IWC resolutions calling on governments to act against Sea Shepherd were adopted unanimously, in the hope that this would contribute to an enabling environment at the IWC. With this background in mind, the Japanese Government announcement that it was recalling its whaling fleet from the Southern Ocean because of Sea Shepherd is puzzling, even though it was followed by a request from Japan’s Foreign Affairs Minister to the Governments of Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands to cut any link with that organization.

Of course it is well known that the whaling industry is in bad economic shape. Japanese people have lost their taste for whale meat and there is currently a stockpile of frozen whale meat which is estimated at 6000 tonnes, an historic high. For this reason, when the fleet departed in December, Greenpeace-Japan had already predicted that the whaling season would be shortened. With shrinking whale meat sales, the State-owned Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) which conducts the “scientific” hunt does not manage to cover its operating costs; it’s been reported that the ICR recently asked the government to donate more public money in support of their operation. This, as well as the considerable cost of a Japanese Government campaign to support the membership of a myriad of countries in the IWC via funds from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other sources, is likely to be seen as offensive by the Treasury in a time of economic hardship in Japan.

But if it was seriously considering ending its operation, why did the Japanese Government take an approach this week which is so much at odds with the save-face requirement they were asking for until now? Why didn’t they make a well planned voluntary announcement, for example last year when the World Biodiversity Conference took place in Nagoya, Japan only a few weeks before the departure of the whaling fleet to the Southern Ocean? Everyone would have applauded them then, and not Sea Shepherd. Rather than face-saving what they’ve done looks like whaling hara-kiri. Even if it is still early to say that the early return of the fleet this season means that the whaling interests are defeated for good, the credibility of Japan’s whaling strategy is now very seriously undermined. It will be harder for example for Japan to continue to canvas support from small developing countries at the IWC, even if it wants to. One plausible explanation is that in the context of Japanese domestic whaling policy driven by a strong pro-whaling lobby of parliamentarians many of which are members of the opposition party, blaming Sea Shepherd is a face-saving strategy for the government.

Another question is whether the shock wave of the U-turn of the whaling fleet will be restricted to the whale conservation issue, or whether it will have implications beyond whaling. What message does it send to NGOs campaigning for the protection of, for example, bluefin tuna, sharks and other marine species? Is it an invitation to muscle up their action, stop dialogue and prioritize "direct action" instead as Sea Shepherd has been doing for years? In the context of climate change also, activists are discussing the role of civil disobedience. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were inspired by this week’s unexpected development in the Southern Ocean.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE

Sinking Moruroa?

2011-02-09T01:44:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago marked the fifteenth anniversary of the last nuclear weapon test in French Polynesia, which took place on 27 January, 1996.

When the French military carried out 147 underground nuclear tests in the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa between June 1975 and January 1996, they wiped out all expressions of concern about the effect of the nuclear blasts for the structural stability of the atolls. Unfounded, unrealistic, alarmist and deliberately misleading were some of the adjectives used against against the nuclear test opponents. There was no risk of collapse, and no risk of leakage of radioactive substances into the Pacific Ocean, they said.

So I was interested today, when my attention was brought to the fact that on 27 January, coincidentally on the fifteenth anniversary of the last nuclear explosion in French Polynesia, the local newspaper Les Nouvelles de Tahiti revealed that during a guided tour on Moruroa for local Polynesian media, the Ministry of Defence's Delegate for nuclear safety recognized that the risk of collapse was real.

According to Les Nouvelles, the Ministry of Defence now envisages that -- depending on the characeristics of the geological damage -- "several dozen million cubic metres" or "hundreds of million cubic metres" could fall into the sea anytime now. According to the Ministry of Defence the collapse of a bloc of about 100 million cubic metres would create at the site a wave of less than three metres, hence hardly perceptible on the nearest inhabited atoll of Tureia. But the Ministry says also that if 600 million cubic metres were to crack, this would cause a tydal wave of six to eight metres, which according to the Ministry's calculation would still measure one to two metres when it reaches Tureia, a cosiderable height for a low-lying atoll. According to the Ministry's best bet a wave at the site of between ten and twenty metres can be expected, thus liable to flood the nearest inhabited atoll.

The Defence Ministry maintains the theory the radionuclides trapped in the basalt under the coral would not leak into the surrounding marine environment even in the worst geological scenario, because they were vitrified by the extreme temperature during the nuclear blasts. It is hard to find this argument convincing, though, because what it means is that at best the rock has become an unpackaged solid radioactive waste liable to leach out and which according to internationally accepted rules of radioprotection should not be dumped and left in the sea. And of course the argument is even less reassuring when you think that it is given by the very same people who, not long ago, were denying the possibility that blowing dozens of nuclear bombs under these atolls could ever affect their geological stability.

Coming next: underwater nuclear plants

2011-01-20T18:53:00.008+01:00

There seems to be between the Russian and French nuclear establishments a race to see who will design and operate the most absurd and perhaps most dangerous new type of nuclear reactor.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the emerging issue of the floating nuclear reactors the Russian Federation is currently building to tug, lease and/or sell in various parts of the world, in order to produce electricity in remote regions and facilitate the development of subseabed mining, water desalination and other energy-hungry activities. (For more information on this Russian scheme click on "Floating nuclear reactors" in the right-hand column)

But today I've learned in the French newspaper Le Figaro that a French engineering firm is developing underwater nuclear power plants in partnership with the French nuclear giant AREVA, the French utility company EDF and the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Le Figaro describes the project as a "low-cost" nuclear reactor. Of course, the one million megawatts question is whether low-cost for the operator means high-cost for the environment.

Well, relax. According to Patrick Boissier, the President of DCNS, the engineering firm developing the project quoted in Le Figaro, there's nothing to worry about. In case of a meltdown of the reactor or radioactive leaks in the ocean, he says they'll fix the problem by pumping seawater into the reactor: "Water is a natural barrier to radiation" (sic), says Mr. Boissier.

As I found it hard to believe, I did a little search on the Internet, and found an article on the website of the French engineering magazine L'Usine Nouvelle. If you watch the video that goes with it, I recommend that you turn the sound on: the music is very cool, it should help you relax if the thought of nuclear power plants rusting on the bottom of the ocean freaked you out.

Intrigued by the promotional video, and I then visted the website of the engineering firm DCNS, where they proudly advertise the project. In addition to the lead story, you can click on "En savoir plus..." (Find out more...). There, there are three subsections: The Market - The solution (Flexblue, the brand name of these underwater nuke plants) - and What "the" experts say (the quote marks around the word "the" are mines). Three "experts" are quoted: one is the director of the engineering firm, so that does not count (biased, obviously). The other two are seemingly French academics working for a foundation and a Paris university. They're both quoted as saying that there could be merits to developing small scale nuclear reactors, but they're not saying anything about placing them on the seabed. It's hard to tell whether these two researchers are quoted out of context, or whether they're on the payroll of DCNS. Maybe both...

In their website DCNS indicate that the initial feasibility studies are going to take two years. The idea is to anchor these nuclear reactors of up to 250 MWe at depths of 60 to 100 metres, a few kilometres from the coasts. Several reactors could be towed together incrementally as local energy needs grow. French taxpayers will be thrilled, I suppose. Fishermen and French tourism operators too.

Chez Rémi español

2011-01-11T18:57:00.000+01:00

While I'm in New York at the UN intersessional meeting for the Rio+20 conference, the Spanish news agency EFE has launched my new blog in español "Vuelta a Rio" (Back to Rio). The idea is to follow in a lively manner, on a weekly basis or more, the process leading up to next year's "Rio+20" conference (2012). My first post is up, an adaptation in Spanish of this week-end's piece here Chez Rémi.

Desde la reunión intersesional de la ONU para la conferencia Rio+20 aquí en Nueva York, hemos lanzado hoy mi nuevo blog publicado por la Agencia EFE en castellano. La idea es seguir de manera amena, semanalmente o más, los preparativos de la conferencia "Rio20" (2012) de la ONU. Mi primer artículo acaba de publicarse. Valoro vuestras opiniones, para mejorar.

Eco Generation 3.0

2011-01-10T00:06:00.006+01:00

I arrived last night in New York where I'll attend, tomorrow and Tuesday at the UN, the first intersessional meeting to start preparing the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). Also known among policy wonks as the Rio+20 conference, this event in Rio de Janeiro will mark the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit of 1992. According to the United Nations General Assembly, the objective is "to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assessing the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development and addressing new and emerging challenges."

Twenty years after Rio also means fourty years after Stockholm -- the first UN Conference on the Human Environment that took place in the capital of Sweden in June, 1972. Although a lot of good things came out of Stockholm, especially the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), we all know that a lot has since been wasted and lost forever by lack of will among governments and the business sector. At Rio+20 next year, public opinion will be mobilized again, but it's unclear how our leaders will listen, how far they'll be willing to shake things up this time. Will they drag their feet like their predecessors in the last fourty years?

To avoid repeating the same mistakes, it's useful to show to the new generation of leaders what opportunities were missed in the past (and to explain how much it's costing to the economy). But I think it's also important to show that not all the efforts deployed all these years were in vain. The planet isn't in good shape of course, but it would be even worse without the measures and safeguards we've managed to put in place.

So I thought I'd bring with me this week in New York a few copies of my vintage collection of ECO, the first daily bulletin ever produced by NGOs at a UN conference, at Stockholm 1972. After fourty years, the ECO 1972 series is a fascinating read. The political landscape has changed so radically since Stockhom it looks like living on another planet (the cold war is over, many countries have undergone extraordinary economic and political transformations, new sovereign nations were born, countries and regions with negligible influence at the time of Stockholm have emerged as major powers, and the very basic design and lay-out of ECO 72 also reminds us how modern information technology has transformed the way we work and communicate), some of the environmental issues that occupied entire pages of ECO in Stockholm have vanished (for example, no country conducts nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, the practice of chartering ships loaded with industrial wastes to dumping them in the high seas has been prohibited, large scale commercial whaling is no longer taking place, DDT is banned and where it is not it will soon be phased out, etc.), but some features identified and discussed in ECO in 1972 are still relevant fourty years later.

Here are a few pearls from ECO 72, that could be reproduced in an ECO 2012 with only some minor editing:

"The next government spokesman who stresses his nation's concern for the environment should be forced to eat the 1972 SIPRI Yearbook -- without SALT. This massive study of World Armaments and Disarmament, compiled by the Swedish International Peace Research Institute, leaves no doubt as to national priorities. SIPRI estimates that annual world expenditure on arms is running at about USD 180 billion. Compare that with the national munificience which, on behalf of the environment, may be prepared - reluctantly - to fork out USD 20 million." ECO 14 June 1972

"The State Department’s official instructions to the US delegation at the Stockholm Conference have fallen into our hands [...] The State Department seems particularly intent on seeing that no more money be made available for international environmental protection. " ECO 10 June 1972

"Implicit in the Conference’s many proposals for much-needed monitoring and data collection is the comfortable notion that if countries monitor their pollution they can safely keep on emitting it [...] Nations’ readiness to agree on collecting data about what they are doing (rather than stopping doing it) is symptomatic of a general failing to the Conference." ECO 13 June, 1972

"The industrial countries have a clear obligation to make sacrifices on behalf of the non-industrial ones, if there is to be any qualitative improvement of societies and environments. Rich nation politicians had better start thinking now how they are going to persuade their electorate that radical changes are necessary." ECO 10 June 1972

"The Australians declared there was “no such thing” as global environmental stability.” ECO 9th June, 1972

"Tossing the Secretariat’s draft Declaration on the Human Environment to the closed Working Group has been like dropping it into a school of piranha." ECO 13th June, 1972

"Japan is making a strong bid for the status of superpower in the emerging politics of ecologicalconcern and technology [...] but what the Japanese press will probably not report is Japan's insistence in continuing destructive whaling practices and policies." ECO 6th June 1972

Like Stockholm 72 and Rio 92, Rio+20 will be the passing of the torch to a new generation of environmental activists. It would be good if we could set for ourselves the goal that everything in ECO 72 becomes completely obsolete for the Eco Generation 3.0 to follow. It's about time.

Fish in the sky

2011-01-01T13:30:00.002+01:00

Oh my Gaia! Ten percent of the 21st century has passed already. And we continue to live in a mess!

I like this photo I took this week in Barcelona. End-of-year street ligtening in the Barceloneta district. Plenty of fish, plenty of tuna, plenty of bluefins in the sky. I wish it'd help people passing by realize that there is less fish in the sea than when the 21st century began.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), over 70% percent of the world's fisheries resources are now either overexploited, fully exploited, significantly depleted or recovering from overexploitation. The UN-designated International Year of Biodiversity has ended yesterday. Meanwhile, only a mere 1% of the ocean is enjoying protection.

Race for the future

2010-12-29T00:17:00.003+01:00

I've just finished a 36 slides presentation for my 40 minute lecture on 30 December, for the departure of the Barcelona World Race.

I wonder whether my lecture will prompt the racers to sail away faster than usual (maybe I should sing!).

If you're in Barcelona this week, come over to my lecture. I want it to be a dialogue.

Giants

2010-12-15T02:46:00.001+01:00

On his way for what was thought to be a routine operation in the Madrid clinic where he passed away yesterday, the flamenco giant Enrique Morente sang a poem of Picasso "to" the painting of Guernica in the Reina Sofia Museum.

Watch the video (The last one we'll see/hear of Morente).

The meeting of the two giants - Picasso and Morente now looks like a prophecy.

So does the shot of Morente on the floor, like a wounded bull.

Some things never change...

2010-12-12T21:46:00.006+01:00

I took this photo in New York this morning, thirty years after the killing of John Lennon.

When this poster hit me at the corner of 44th with 6th Ave, it immediately evoked in my mind the title of Supertramp's album Some things never change...

The good news though this week-end is that now after Cancún, it is possible the war on the climate could be over in a foreseeable future. If we want it.

Beyond the blame game

2010-11-29T08:59:00.009+01:00

I don't know if it's because his organization was unusually in the spotlight in the last two weeks. At the end of the Paris "tuna conference" on Saturday, the Secretary General of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) asked me if I was going home with a better opinion of his organization.

I think I'm going home with a better understanding of ICCAT, which is about trade of individual species and not about marine ecosystems conservation (maybe the name should be changed into ICTAT, with the first T for Trade). Despite the word "conservation", fisheries interests run the show at ICCAT and Environment administrations have hardly any or no say. It's so bad that maybe it wouldn't be worst if the Trade ministers were in charge. The failures of ICCAT examplify the need for deep reform of the regional fisheries management organizations system. ICCAT has formed a sub-group to discuss its future, including a possible redraft of the ICCAT convention, but they're not expecting results before five or six years. It might thus be a good idea to discuss these issues in a broader context, between now and 2012 which is not only the year of the next Earth Summit but also of the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

When I was at the airport yesterday a key member of ICCAT (if you follow me on Facebook, you'll guess who that was) told me that he was disappointed environmental NGOs had been so critical of the outcome of the conference. With the protection awarded to two shark species last week, he would have thought we'd been more positive. His concern was that if NGOs are critical even when good things happen, then governments have no incentives to continue in the right direction. Well, NGOs were delighted with the protection granted to hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks (two measures that had been promoted by NGOs in the first place). But governments should not think that throwing such bones at the NGOs is enough to "buy" their support.

This does not mean that NGOs can't go beyond the blame game. When it makes sense, they can acknowledge steps taken in the right direction, and even support them decisively though it's clear they're insufficient. The best example of this perhaps is the action of key NGOs in support of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change when and after it was adopted in 1997 as a first step towards bolder greenhouse gas emission reductions. If it had not been for the campaign of some NGOs, the Kyoto Protocol would never have been ratified by the European Union and Japan in 2002 and it would never have entered into force in 2005. And still today (in Cancun this week for example) NGOs are supporting the efforts to maintain and reinforce Kyoto. And to go beyond of course.

Crystal ball management

2010-11-20T10:32:00.006+01:00

I'm glad ICCAT's Week # 1 in Paris is ending today. Tomorrow is Sunday, and the annual assembly of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas will observe a pause. Then Week # 2 will begin Monday morning, and the delegates of the 48 member countries will need to be very creative, and very fast, to find a way of avoiding that, when the assembly ends on Saturday 27, it does not all look like a sham.

The week started with a successful seminar on Tuesday at the Oceanographic Institute which I'd spent two months putting together. I went to bed very late that night, because the plan was to have the report prepared by IISD Reporting Services available in three languages on the following morning when the ICCAT Compliance Committee would begin.

Wednesday was also hectic, with at the same time an eye on the ICCAT Compliance Committee and a couple of cellphones on both ears connected with Brussels where the EU member States were trying to figure out what to do in response to the proposal by the EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki (a 50% reduction in the Mediterranean bluefin tuna Total Allowable Catch for 2011). What Damanaki had proposed was the right thing to do: basically it would have allowed for a continuation of artisanal fisheries and stopped the industrial operations responsible for the Mediterranean bluefin tuna crisis (in just three decades 85% of the population has gone!). It was encouraging to see the EU Commissioner trying her best, but she got bullied by the French Agriculture and Fisheries Minister who led a mutiny (with support from Spain and Italy) against the EU proposal. As a result now, instead of a bluefin-tuna-saving-plan what the EU has got is only an EU-face-saving-plan: they're talking of a "partial reduction" of around 1000 or 1500 tons that won't help speeding up the bluefin recovery. As Richard Black wrote in his blog on Wednesday, all eyes are on France. And the 1 million tuna question for Week 2 now that the young French Agriculture/Fisheries Minister Bruno Le Maire has shown to his clientèle of fishers that he can behave in Brussels like a 700 kilogramme macho bluefin in a China shop, is whether he can be smart enough to show flexibility. Now that he's off the fishers' hook, it would make sense for him to accept a real compromise in the coming days.

[There is a nice WWF-France video where I'm commenting on the French mutiny in Brussels]

The reason why the French position is not sustainable is because even in the most optimistic scenario envisaged by the scientists who've worked on the ICCAT Bluefin Stock Assessment, they warn that there's a 40% possible error margin. Under these circumstances, the precautionary principle should prevail, but France seems to choose to evoke precaution only when it fits them politically. However the precationary principle should not be considered a dish on an à la carte menu. A few years ago, the precautionary principle was even incorporated in the Constitution of the French Republic (the set menu).

The French/EU position is so bad that it makes Japan look very good. That's what we call in French le monde à l'envers, or questioning the conventional belief that the Japanese are ruthless fishers who empty everyone else's ocean for their own selfish benefit. The Japanese, who import 80% of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna are actually very concerned with the way the bluefin business is conducted in the Mediterranean, and they're demanding control and action.

In environmental management, ignoring severe uncertainties (including those caused by negligence and the resulting lack of control over illegal fishing) is what we call crystal ball management. So yesterday for the opening ceremony of the ICCAT Plenary, we displayed a fine crystal ball on all delegates' tables, with the following engraved words: "Not Intended to be used as a bluefin tuna management tool".

There is still another entire week of negotiations to come. So, it's still early to tell what will or might finally happen next week. Even though I have a crystal ball.

Accumulation

2010-11-12T23:20:00.000+01:00

I was very impressed when I visited last month at Paris' Pompidou Centre the exhibition on the life and works of the French-born artist Arman. What I liked best and found most inspiring were Arman's accumulations of consumer objects -- mostly wastes which he turned into invaluable artworks. I suppose Arman wanted to point a finger at how unfaithful we are to objects we seem to cherish but nevertheless throw away very fast, like disposable lovers. And as I was walking through Arman's accumulations created in the 1960s and very early 1970s, I remember asking myself what it would be like if he had made them now, in the age of electronic junk.

The accumulation of electronic junk is the subject of Annie Leonard's new webfilm The Story of Electronics. After The Story of Stuff on the impact of consumerism (not only to the environment and the economy but also to our brains and souls), with The Story of Electronics, Annie makes us stop and think again at objects that are so common to us that we rarely think where they come from and where they go.

PS: The accumulation on the armchair on the photo is not Arman's. I just did it in the living room at home. I better clean up that mess before my wife gets home.

Can I play a bit longer with my toys before I go to bed?

2010-11-02T23:14:00.000+01:00

Le thon monte

2010-11-01T17:17:00.000+01:00

Ce week-end un auteur qui prépare un bouquin sur l'histoire des rapports de Greenpeace avec la France (sujet ardu!) m'a demandé pourquoi il y avait si peu de posts en français chez Rémi. C'est bien simple: je n'utilise ma langue maternelle que lorsque je m'adresse spécifiquement à des lecteurs français ou francophones.

C'est le cas aujourd'hui, pour annoncer que l'inscription en ligne est ouverte pour le séminaire "Quel Avenir pour le thon rouge? - Perspectives avant la CICTA" que j'organise conjointement avec IDDRI-Sciences Po à l'Institut Océanographique de Paris, le 16 novembre de 17h00 à 20h00.

Ce séminaire se tiendra la veille de l'ouverture, à Paris, de la réunion extraordinaire de la Commission Internationale pour la Conservation des Thonidés de l'Atlantique (CICTA), et comptera avec la participation de nombreux experts français et étrangers, y compris les présidents de la CICTA et de son Comité scientifique.

On estime que depuis les années 70, 85% des thons rouges de l'Atlantique (qui pour la plupart se reproduisent dans la Méditerranée) ont disparu. En mars dernier, la conférence des parties à la Convention CITES sur le commerce international des espèces menacées ont renoncé à interdire le commerce des thons rouges de Mediterranée, arguant que c'était dans le cadre de la CICTA, et non de la CITES, que devaient être décidées les mesures à prendre pour assurer la pérenité de l'espèce.

Certains proposent la suspension des pêcheries de thons rouges pour permettre aux stocks de se reconstituer pendant que des moyens de contrôle efficaces sont mis en place. On propose aussi l'interiction de l pêche des thons rouges dans leurs zones de frai pour mettre fin à la rupture continue de leur cycle de reproduction (six zones de frai ont été identifiées en Méditerranée).

En cette Année Internationale de la Biodiversité, la CICTA peut-t-elle encore noyer le poisson? Rendez-vous le 16 novembre à l'Institut Océanographique pour obtenir une réponse à cette question.

Pov' con?

2010-10-24T17:56:00.005+02:00

I'm just about to leave Paris after I spent a week here doing press briefings for foreign correspondents, and a number of bilateral consultations on a number of issues.

Everybody based abroad I've spoken with this week has asked me how things were in Paris with the strikes. So I thought I'd upload this photo I took this morning at Cours de Vincennes when I was visiting the flee market there.

Someone wrote on a post box "Vive la grève" (grève means strike). And some time later someone put a "Pov' con" sticker besides the graffiti. Pov' con (a contraction of "pauvre con") would best translate as "little piece of shit", I think.

Sadly, I think that by and large this photo reflects fairly accurately the level of the debate.

A whale called Trotsky

2010-10-16T13:49:00.008+02:00

Because of too many other commitments, I’ve finally decided not to go to the Biodiversity conference that starts in Nagoya, Japan this week-end. But as I’ve been involved in Nagoya-related discussions in the last couple of years with a number of public authorities and civil society organizations within and outside Japan, I’ll follow it from a distance.

My colleague and friend Duncan Currie who’s in Nagoya now tells me that the local fish market has been closed to foreigners for the duration of the Biodiversity conference.

I’m sure that the local authorities will say that this measure has been taken with due regard to the safety of their foreign guests, as well as for the tranquility of the fish workers. Well, that may be so. But I can’t help remembering that all Japanese officials I spoke with in the last two or three years were showing unease (sometimes nervousness) each time I was telling them that it was important for them to realize that, for a very large majority of Western reporters coming to Japan for the biodiversity conference the Biodiversity + Japan = whales + bluefin + dolphins equation was a very obvious one. Of course, I was not suggesting that they close the fish market to the public. My proposal was to take advantage of the biodiversity conference to make some landmark announcement on marine biodiversity (such as ending the scientific whaling scam in the Southern Ocean, for example, or [and?] supporting calls for the closure of the fishing of bluefin tuna in their spawning grounds).

The closure of the fish market to Western visitors (including journalists) during the biodiversity conference reminds me the Soviet Union leadership wiping out Trotsky from their photo collections. In the real world, wiping out Trotsky had exactly the opposite effect: it was drawing attention and maintaining his memory.

Limits

2010-10-10T11:26:00.015+02:00

The Fishing, Trade and Consumer Affairs Association for Bluefin Tuna(APCCR), a pressure group set up and funded by corporations in the bluefin tuna business, was reported as saying last Friday that "There is no possibility of bluefin tuna collapse."

To me, this looks like a misleading statement issued to confuse policy-makers before the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) next month in Paris. So, I thought I'd try to help bring some clarity.

I listened carefully last week to the presentation on the Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna population assessment carried out by ICCAT scientists, from which APCCR says it is drawing its claim. Here's what the scientists said: if annual catches are set to 13,500 tons, there is a 60% possibility that the bluefin tuna population could recover by 2022. In other words, what they're saying is that there is a 40% possibility that the population does not recover. So, we’re very far from the APCCR “no possibily of collapse” hypothesis. And if we take account of the poor compliance record of the fishing fleets within the area covered by ICCAT, things could be worst.

I suppose APCCR members are nervous because the EU Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki said recently to a hearing before the Environment Committee of the European Parliament that “if the [ICCAT] report says that we must reduce the quota, we will. I am ready to close the fisheries”.

Fishy

2010-10-08T10:53:00.005+02:00

Richard Black is reporting in his blog about something fishy that came up this week at the Committee on Reasearch and Statistics of the International Commission for the Consevration of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

The meeting was ajourned at lunch time. Despite the best attempts of ICCAT scientists, it did not bring the all the right answers, and raised a lot of questions.

Next stop, Paris next month.

Half empty

2010-10-07T10:00:00.006+02:00

When environmental policy-makers are faced with scientific uncertainties and knowledge gaps, they've got to decide whether they see a glass that is half full or half empty. If it looks half empty it's easier to take precautionary action; if it's said to be half full that can lead to a cover up of too permissive policies.

I am locked this week in a conference room that looks like a cave, in a Madrid hotel where I am attending the meeting of the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), where government scientists are trying to respond to the request of the 48 member States to carry out a reliable assessment of the state of the population of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a species which is thought to be near collapse and which has become, as a result, an icon of shrinking marine populations in the Mediterranean Sea. Decades of overfishing, scattered and unreliable monitoring and reporting, and disregard for science have led to an estimated decline of up to 85 percent since 1970. ICCAT will hold its annual meeting in Paris in the second half of November, and there it must decide whether to suspend the bluefin tuna commercial fisheries or to risk irreversible damage to the bluefin tuna resource.

ICCAT scientists may be doing their best to respond, but there's only so much they can do in a context where the vast majority of member States fails to report their catches in an accurate and timely manner. So, inevitably this means the glass is half empty, and scientists have a hard time recommending solid, credible and safe 2011 catch limits for the species.

Emerging dilemma for the nuclear industry

2010-09-29T00:37:00.007+02:00

Someone who read the piece I wrote last week about Russia's floating nuclear reactors has drawn my attention to the fact that the Nuclear Safety Commission of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be discussing at its 28th Session this week on 30 September and 1st October issues related to floating nuclear reactors (which they call barge-mounted nuclear power plant -- that sounds even more like a Homer Simpson invention).

See Item 5.06 of the Provisional Agenda. And the note prepared by the IAEA Secretariat to introduce the discussion.

Besides all the technical concerns outlined in the IAEA note, I think the nuclear establishment has a big credibility problem with the emergence of these floating nuclear reactors: in the last couple of decades they've presented themselves as a part of the solution to climate change with claims that the redeployment of nuclear power was necessary to meet greenhouse gases reduction pledges and obligations. But now floating (barge-mounted) nuclear reactors are about to be deployed to facilitate the exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels in the Arctic and other remote regions. Ah!

I suppose the IAEA is faced by a serious dilemma. The objective of the agency as defined in Article II of its Statute is to "seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world." So, some might say that they have to seek to accelerate and enlarge the use of floating nuclear reactors. But I hope many others will object and say that this is not likely to bring "peace, health and prosperity throughout the world." Quite the opposite.

Still afloat: floating nuclear reactors

2010-09-22T13:50:00.009+02:00

Since I've started sharing six or seven years ago my concerns over Russian plans to build, operate and sell floating nuclear reactors (including my drafting and promotion jointly with Alexi Yablokov of an IUCN resolution that was adopted in 2004), I think a lot of people thought I was excessive.

Most people believed these floating nuclear reactors were just a scam mounted by clever Russian engineers who were very creatively ripping off public administrations and private investors with crazy plans that would never see the light. The dominating view a few years ago was that floating nuclear reactors would never exist beyond the drawing boards of a few mad Russian nuclear scientists.

So now I invite all floatingnukes-skeptics to watch the story the BBC has just released last night, which includes a video taken inside the St. Petersburg shipyard where the construction of the first of a series of nine floating nuclear reactors is underway, and set to be completed in 2012.

The Director of the company constructing that thing, Sergey Zavyalov has told the BBC "We can guarantee the safety of our units one hundred per cent, all risks are absolutely ruled out." One hundred per cent! All risks ruled out! Does this make you feel better? Isn't such a degree of self-confidence in an untested technology a little bit scary? One hundred per cent! This would be the first time it can be guaranteed that a floating object under extreme weather conditions cannot sink under any circumstances. One hundred per cent? What contingency measures are envisaged and will be in place in the remote areas where the nuclear reactors will be tugged? What safeguards against human errors and sabotage are also envisaged? (I'll stop here; the list of questions could be very long)

A few weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph also reported that Russia and China have signed a deal to further develop floating nuclear reactors. The story suggests that in addition to the Arctic, Antarctica is also envisaged as a place to deploy floating nuclear reactors to extract mineral resources (what do the Parties to the Antarctic Treaty and its Madrid Protocol think of this great idea?), and the Middle East too, to provide the energy necessary to desalinate water (what does the CIA, and Bin Laden, think of this other great idea?).

Whale watching

2010-09-21T05:46:00.004+02:00

I just returned from this evening's Award Ceremony of this year's Equator Initiative Awards Ceremony, which I found quite inspiring. The prize given to small and indigenous communities from Africa, Asia and Latin America means a lot to those who receive them. This recognition gives them visibility and maybe even protection within their own countries.

Held at the American Museum of Natural History, the award ceremony took place during a dinner that was preceded by a policy forum about Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Climate Change.

Less than a month before the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity meets in Nagoya, Japan, this was certainly not considered to be the place to mention, let alone discuss the consequences for whaling of the detrimental impacts of climate change on cetaceans, especially in the Polar regions.

But when we were escorted to the ceremony venue after the policy forum, I thought it was cool that our dinner tables were installed under the Museum's famous life-size blue whale reproduction. Even though I was probably the only one present who made the link.

Summit

2010-09-20T02:50:00.004+02:00

I'm in New York this week for several meetings and a workshop in the margins of the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals.

This afternoon I was in a meeting to discuss preparations of a focus group for another summit in two years time, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20 and scheduled to take place in May, 2012 in Brazil to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.

And I was wondering if it's right to always use the word summit, each time people at the top of governments get together. Perhaps it would be more challenging and more motivating to talk of summits only on the occasions when they (and we) have all managed to climb to the top of a steep mountain.

Paris-Roma

2010-09-10T15:40:00.008+02:00

Like all decent French citizens, I am puzzled and ashamed by President Sarkozy's latest stunt, the collective deportation of Roma people to Romania and Bulgaria.

I've been this week in Paris for a series of meetings. When I passed by the National Assembly yesterday, I noticed there was a new merchandise store there I had never paid attention to. Umbrellas were on display with this abstract (in French) from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "All human beings are born free and equal".

It was too tempting: I had an hour to spare, so I bought an umbrella and went and paused with it in front of the Elysée Palace, the President's residence.

Home-made WMD

2010-08-30T23:22:00.007+02:00

Before going back home I've cleaned up the bedroom in my summer retreat. And as I was just about to throw into the recycling bin this copy of USA Today, August 17, I thought I ought to take a photo of the front page.

"Military towns enjoy big booms", it says.

"Rapidly rising pay and benefits in the armed forces have lifted many military towns into the ranks of the nation's most affluent communities [...] 16 of the 20 metro areas rising the fastest in the per-capita income rankings since 2000 had military bases or one nearby."

So, as the boys (and girls) are heading home from Iraq, are they going to find a weapon of mass destruction of a different kind, a real estate speculative market pushing families into unsustainable debts, with the risk this entails for everyone in the context of an overall fragile economy?

"What's driving the income growth: pay and benefits in the military have grown faster than those in any other part of the economy [...] Military compensation -- an average of $70,168 in pay and $52,095 in benefits -- includes [...] hazardous-duty incentives, enlistment bonus and combat pay in war zones [...] After adjusting for inflation, military compensation rose 84% from 2000 through 2009."

Voila.

Four Fish

2010-08-18T13:31:00.006+02:00

I'm glad I'm Washington DC this week, because it gave the opportunity last night to attend Paul Greenberg's entertaining presentation of his recently published book Four Fish, about the fate of salmon, tuna, bass and cod. Four Fish is destined to become a classic, not only for people concerned with marine biodiversity but also with culinary diversity and food traditions.

"Today, rampant overfishing and an unprecedented biotech revolution have brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex and confusing marketplace. We stand on the edge of a cataclysm; there is a distinct possibility that our children's children will never eat a wild fish that has swam in the sea". That should keep me awake on my flight home tomorrow.

The book presentation was at Politics & Prose, the most wonderful (and the most progressive, I suppose) bookstore in the US capital, with so many attractive rarities that, hadn't I controlled myself I'm sure I'd ended up paying for excess baggage on my way home tomorrow.

On my signed copy of Four Fish, Paul wrote "Rémi, save the whales...and the tuna". Right, we're working on that too.

Dishes for tomorrow

2010-08-08T20:17:00.015+02:00

One of my favorite holiday hobbies under the sun in central Spain is to collect and watch dead insects (and sometimes to draw them on paper). Another of my holiday hobbies is creative photography.

So, I've combined both to illustrate The Guardian's recent story "Insects could be the key to meeting food needs of growing global population" prompted by the work of the UN FAO to explore the use of insects to feed humans as a means to address water shortage and water pollution, destructive fishing, greenhouse gas emissions from farming, and to enhance habitat protection and forest biodiversity conservation.

If as a French child I enjoyed eating snails [I don't anymore :-)], I suppose that insects could be as enjoyable for me as light crispy appetizers.

I hope you'll enjoy my insects sushi (above, an environment-friendly alternative to Atlantic bluefin tuna to help this species recover), and my spicy insect risotto (below).

Plastiki

2010-07-28T00:03:00.006+02:00

There's been so many, it's hard to find a new environmental advocacy initiative truly inspiring these days.

The story of the Plastiki,the vessel made of 12,500 plastic bottles that just completed its cruise accross the Pacific Ocean, is one.

I recommend a visit to the Plastiki website.

Since I heard of it several years ago, I've wondered why apparently no environmental organization was documenting at sea the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a sea of waste between California and Hawaii which is said to be about five times the size of the UK (five times, yes, the size of the UK, yes) that sits just below the surface between California and Hawaii.

So, I look forward to looking at the Plastiki photo gallery as soon as I get the time.

Words and values

2010-07-21T09:09:00.013+02:00

As I was reading yesterday on the website of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) "Moving toward Nagoya", an overview of preparations for the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in which the author Brooks Shaffer discusses whether the failure of the international community to come to grips with the challenges of biodiversity conservation has got something to do with a lack of attraction for the word biodiversity in the general public and by extension among lawmakers, I remembered that I have an old shirt with the words "Halt the loss of Biodiversity" written under an IUCN Countdown 2010 logo.

With all due respect, I must confess that when they kindly gave me this shirt in 2004 at the IUCN Congress in Bangkok, I thought "Halt the loss of Biodiversity" sounded like a phrase produced by a group of policy nerds speaking to themselves rather than a slogan to impact on the wider world. I'm glad thus to see now on the IUCN Countdown website that they've replaced the words "Halt the loss of Biodiversity" by "Save Biodiversity". Even though Save Life on Earth would be more to the point, in my opinion. The natural capital or assets meltdown analogy which many allude to since the 2008 financial market crisis is good too. But Save Life catches it all, I think. And in terms of public mobilization, it's hard to find a more praiseworthy and exciting goal.

Halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010 was a reference to the so-called biodiversity target Heads of State and Government at the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) had endorsed in 2002, whereby at the end of the decade the trend of biodiversity loss would be reversed. Alas, no-one needed to wait for the recent publication of UNEP's
3rd Global Biodiversity Outlook to find out that the opposite happened.

It was to highlight the 2010 target that the United Nations designated this year the International Year of Biodiversity. The Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan (18-29 October) will be preceded by a special high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York on 20 September. At that meeting it is expected that governments endorse the creation of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), also known in the policy jargon as an IPCC for biodiversity, with reference to the important role in climate policy of the Intergovernmental Panel of experts on Climate Change. And in Nagoya it is hoped that the long-awaited Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit-Sharing can be adopted to control and stop biopiracy and thus incentivize the conservation of biodiversity in developing countries.

These expected developments are important. Because if the Nagoya Conference was to adopt only a new set of 2020 biodiversity targets after having completely failed with their 2010 targets, it would face a severe credibility crisis.

Detox

2010-07-12T10:49:00.004+02:00

I'm travelling in Asia this week, and I forgot my cellphone at home when I left for the airport.

So, if you ring me, it's not that I'm ignoring you. If you need something, just use email.

One thing I liked in Norway in the 1970s was their weekly TV-Free Day (I think it was every Tuesday: the national television was not emitting and as private channels, satellite dishes and the Internet did not exist, people were forced to face each other and speak to each other).

I think everyone should take at least a cellphone-free week per year.

Time flies

2010-07-10T17:44:00.006+02:00

I told my daughter that today is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour by French secret agents when we were on the way to Moruroa to protest against nuclear weapon testing. And she told me: "you're going to put something in your blog?" So here it is.

I found a well written op'ed in The New York Times by the current Executive Director of Greenpeace International Kumi Naidoo, in which he describes his perception of the bombing as a young South African then living in a township outside Durban. On this anniversary I also visited Greenpeace International's website, and I saw that a third Rainbow Warrior is now under construction in Gdansk.

Twenty-five years is a long time, and the world has changed so much. The temptation is to say that it hasn't changed for the better. But let's be optimistic this week-end.

Kumi Naidoo's account reminds us that the transformation of South Africa is a true civil society success story affecting millions of people for the better (despite all the difficulties they still face of course, and will continue to face when the World Cup is over).

And in 1985 the construction of a Greenpeace ship in Gdansk would have been unconceivable. Before Gorbatchev's Perestroika, the few times we visited Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union on Greenpeace ships or balloons, it only lasted a few hours or a few days each time. The time necessary to get us arrested and expelled from the country.

Moroccan bluff

2010-07-05T20:51:00.009+02:00

One thing that caught my attention during the whaling conference in Morocco last month was the absence of any high authority at the opening of the conference. Normally, the host country is represented at minimum by a Government minister, if not by a member of the Royal family. The host country's opening speech is rarely inspiring to say the truth, but even less so in Agadir where it was read by an almost anonymous bureaucrat who did not even bother to invent an excuse to justify the absence of his boss.

In Agadir, I was expecting the presence of the Moroccan Fisheries Minister, because since his country joined the IWC in the Japanese orbit in 2001, it has been part of the cohort of West African countries who claim (mostly with crocodile tears) that their food security could be at risk because voracious whales are threatening to invade their waters and eat all the fish. In response it's been argued many times that instead West African countries (and everyone else) should be concerned with voracious foreign fishing fleets, excessive fishing effort, wasteful and destructive fishing methods, and non-selective fishing gear (for example, approximately 80% of the cephalopods consumed in Japan come from Moroccan waters, and this is surely more than all the squids the sperm whales in the area can eat). What the Fisheries Minister's absence is telling us is that -- of course -- the "whales are eating our fish" argument is a bluff. If it was so important for the future of his fishermen and his people, surely the minister would have seized the opportunity. The IWC isn't going to meet another time in Morocco in the foreseeable future.

I've been wondering what else was behind what some have interpreted as a lack of courtesy of the Moroccan Minister.

One reason could be that he (or the Prime Minister's office) knows that supporting Japanese whaling might not be so popular among Moroccan voters after all. Like the rest of the world, Moroccan society faces many challenges that are more important than whales for the livelihood of its people of course. But they watch TV stations from France and elsewhere, and are also influenced by the very large Moroccan diaspora that lives and works abroad. Indeed every single Moroccan layperson who spoke with me during my stay there (hotel managers and their staff, taxi drivers, restaurant owners and waiters, shop tenants, newspaper salesmen, Maroc Telecom operators, and even Moroccan journalists like the one with me on the photo, etc.) were showing sympathy for whales, and they had no idea that their country was hosting the whaling conference to give a hand to Japan, not to whales.

Another reason could be that the Fisheries Minister thought it was wiser not to show up in the middle of last month's cascade of journalistic stories concerning alleged bribery and "vote buying" affecting (among others) African countries and delegates.

When the conference began, I suggested to a European activist who had come to Agadir with banners and whale costumes to demonstrate outside the conference, that one useful thing he could do was to display a banner in French that would have said something like "Japan gives orders; Morocco obeys them". "Do it if you don't mind spending a few days in the police station", I said. I'm not entirely sure why he desisted; I suppose that was because he had a non-refundable return ticket.

Thank you to Paul Spong, the man who in 1974 brought whales to Greenpeace and Greenpeace to whales, for taking and sending me the photo illustrating this post.

Wild

2010-07-01T14:13:00.008+02:00

Paul Greenberg sent me this week-end the link to his spectacular feature story "Tuna's end" published by The New Yor Times Magazine.

It's a story about a multi-faceted disaster which combines an environmental tragedy, a looming food security crisis, a development fiasco, a governance failure, a trade-environment conflict, and of course also a very sad culinary loss.

When he was preparing his story, Paul called me and we had a fairly long conversation with me about several aspects of the issues he was looking into. I look forward to reading his book "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food” when it comes out. It would perhaps be useful if that was before the Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Nagoya, Japan in the month of October.

When the dust settles

2010-06-27T14:45:00.014+02:00

I arrived home last night after two weeks in Morocco at the IWC conference.

I recommend the commentary published in the New York Times Environment blog; I agree with every word in it. "What is certain is that the ocean’s largest mammals are no better protected now than they were before the meeting."

I'm sure that as the dust settles, we'll find more commentaries of that kind. I find it hard to understand why some environmentalists celebrate an outcome that means Japan, Iceland and Norway, the three whaling countries have gone home with the assurance that they can continue whaling as much as they want, when and where they want with no international control or restrictions.

Richard Black of the BBC reported in his last entry two nights ago that Japan had been ready to accept a limit of 150 minke whales for its annual whale catches in Antarctica. Of course it is 150 too many. But it is also reasonable to say that compared to the self-allocated "scientific research sampling" of 935 minkes whales and 50 endangered fin whales (and possibly 50 additional humpback whales), it would have meant progress regardless of whether you care because of animal welfare, enviornmental or international governance concerns (or all three together). It is unclear whether 150 minkes would have been the virtual zero the US and other delegations were talking about to help Japan save face before they could stop high seas whaling altogether for economic reasons. But it was certainly closer to it than 935 minke and 50 fin whales.

The young Japanese man with me on the photo is Junichi Sato of Greenpeace-Japan. He told his compelling story and shared his viewpoint with Richard Black. I wish everyone among those who stand for the moratorium had listened to Junichi.

Japan was also ready to accept the clause that would have restricted to domestic markets the consumption of whale meat and other whale products. This would have been a fatal blow to Iceland's whale meat export market entirely dependent on Japan. Iceland announced last week that in the light of the failure of IWC negotiations they would send their fleet this week-end to start killing fin whales.

Joji Morishita, Japan's chief negotiator told me on Friday that for Japan a new period of reflection was starting. I hope that everyone reflects.

[With eleven entries, my daily Agadir blog published by the Spanish Agency EFE is now completed, but will remain online at least for some time. Spanish readers can click here to retrieve it]

Nothing to celebrate

2010-06-23T14:18:00.007+02:00

I am writing from the plenary room of the IWC meeting here in Agadir, where (as it was becoming obvious yesterday) the members States one after the other are declaring dead the negotiation process initiated three years ago to seek an exit to two decades of impasse on whale conservation.

After two days of meetings behind closed doors, they had no courage and no political will, and they threw the baby with the bath water.

The big winners are the three countries, Japan, Iceland and Norway who can go home with the assurance that they can kill thousands of whales with no international control.

And there are two big losers:

The whales of course, who will continue to be hunted commercially (or scientifically as Japan says), including in the Southern Ocean “sanctuary”. The credibility of the IWC is next to nil now, but this is not all.

The incapacity of the 88 IWC members is bad news for the broader picture of international environmental governance too. If the international community is not capable of fixing an issue like this one, where – after all – the interests at stake are very limited and small, what hope does this leave us with that governments will put aside their narrow national interests and principles when they face much more important and complex challenges, such as climate change?

The Environment Minister of Australia, Peter Garrett has just said that the collapse of Agadir (to which he has contributed actively) “is not the end of the world”. Well, I’m not so sure.

(Click here for the Spanish version published by the Spanish news agency EFE)

Take the heat off

2010-06-21T20:53:00.006+02:00

When I participate in complex international conferences where a lot of distinct voices battle to be heard or noticed, I often try to put my imagination to work to find a simple way to communicate directly with everyone on the first day, in order to position above the background noise the organization I’m working for.

One of my favorites for example was when I led the Greenpeace delegation at the legendary WTO Seattle conference back in 1999. There were thousands of pressure groups of all kinds, thousands of demonstrators (and the National Guard) in the streets, and tons of publications and brochures and posters. Among so much paper and noise, our report “Safe Trade in the 21st Century” (safe for the environment, safe for public health, safe for sustainable development) would have gone almost unnoticed if we hadn’t printed the executive summary (“Instructions to practice Safe Trade”) on a box that contained...a green condom. The queue around our diplay was huge; I still have a copy of the documentary made by the BBC, which shows government ministers, high level civil servants, corporations CEOs, NGO representatives, journalists, member of the WTO Secretariat and th Euopean Commission, everyone filling their pockets with our “executive summary”.

One year earlier, in 1998 at a ministerial conference at which we campaigned for measures to ban the Dumping at sea of obsolete offshore installations, the radioactive Discharges from nuclear reprocessing plants, and the Disposal of hazardous substances, we called our proposal the Three-Ds, and we had it printed in 3-D format, and to focus their attention we gave it to all ministers and delegates with the sort of glasses your now get to watch Avatar at the cinema. More recently, in October last year when the climate talks were resumed in Barcelona before Copenhagen, I was working for the Tcktcktck campaign and we had 4000 alarm clocks ringing all at once to wake up the delegates (unfortunately, they went back to sleep almost immediately).

This time for the whaling conference, I anticipated that at this time of year in Agadir the majority of delegates would suffer from the heat in this coastal city on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. So, a couple of months ago, I asked my Varda Group colleague Cristina Castro to find out if there was a way to get 600 fans produced with the words “Take the Heat off the Whales” (in three languages).

At midday, the conference centre and the terraces of the surrounding restaurants had many delegates fanning themselves with the words “Take the Heat off the Whales”. IWC rules prohibit the exhibition of advocacy banners during the negotiations. But fortunately, they don’t prohibit the exhibition of fans!

This afternoon, the countries’ delegates are negotiating under closed doors as if it was the election of a new Pope they're talking about. The negotiations aren’t going well. More on that tomorrow.

(Click here for the Spanish version published by the Spanish news agency EFE)

Yingli!

2010-06-19T03:04:00.004+02:00

I'm not sure whether I need a new pair of glasses, or whether Yingli Solar needs a better designer for their billboard.

From Sweden a regular visitor here Chez Rémi has sent me an email after reading yesterday's blogpiece, to explain that it was because I'd misread its name that I could not find the website of the Chinese solar company that advertises in the World Cup stadiums.

It's Yingli, not Yingu.

Yingli Solar is a major solar energy company and one of the world's largest "vertically integrated" photovoltaic manufacturers. They develop, manufacture and sell photovoltaic modules in a range of places - Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, South Korea, China, and the United States.

With headquarters in Baoding, China, the company has more than 6000 employees and more than 10 branch offices worldwide.

Yingli Green Energy is publicly listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: YGE).

They "aspire to be socially and environmentally responsible in every decision" and their Mission is "to make solar power an enduring and cost-effective technology for all humankind".

Their web-site notes "At Yingli, our core values lie in fostering innovation, building trust and honoring our social responsibility."

Judo in Morocco

2010-06-18T10:59:00.013+02:00

Since the Soccer World Cup started I've been curious to find out about this Chinese solar energy hardware supplier, Yingu, which is advertising in the stadiums. I've tried to find a website for Yingu, but strangely I don't seem to find any (maybe it's in Chinese-only).

There's only one solar company among the World Cup sponsors in the middle of many conventional companies (Castrol, Sony, Visa, etc.). But still, it shows that the green economy is on the move. And, because it's a Chinese company, I hope it's making European and American industry and political leaders realize that they're going to miss the train of the green economy unless they speed up.

I took this photo in the hotel where I'm staying in Agadir, Morocco for the international whaling negotiations, which in many ways look like a football match. Or political judo. After several days of formal and informal negotiations, so far everyone is still on the tatami. And no-one has shifted to karate.

If everyone continues to play by the rules, I think it is still possible to reach an agreement next week. For this to happen, Japan would need to agree to bring an end to its scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean, and we're not there yet.

There is a lot of media interest for this negotiation. The Spanish news agency EFE, for example has asked me to blog in Spanish from Agadir, and I started doing that yesterday. A few days ago, EFE also put out an interview with me, as their IWC curtain-raiser. I think this reflects the interest for whales in the Spanish-speaking world, where whale-watching has boomed in recent years.

Cool or freaky?

2010-06-12T11:22:00.007+02:00

I'll be on my way this evening to Agadir, Morocco for two intense weeks at the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Just before starting to put stuff in my suitecase, I ran into an Argentine guy selling all sorts of pins in Madrid's Plaza Mayor, and I bought a few which I think I could wear at the whaling conference:

The eye on the top row alongside the Agadir souvenir suggests a need for greater transparency (and maybe openness) from all participants.

The whale underneath is a humpback, one of the most iconic whale species (together with the blue whale of course). Humpback whales have been protected since the mid 1960s after being driven to near extinction. Now some populations are starting to show signs of recovery (which reminds us that not all efforts to protect whales have been in vain). In the last few years, Japan has been threatening to kill fifty humpback whales in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. That's what some people call delicious whale research.

And the pin below with a dove on the globe reminds us that there are so many issues affecting our planet, it would be good to get this one (whaling) out of the way.

Not sure whether wearing these pins makes me look cool or freaky. What do you think? Send me an email or a SMS with the word cool or freaky.

On the photo, I'm wearing a whale tie I got at the 1982 IWC meeting where the moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted. 28 years later, this tie is completely démodée. But it's like a totem, so maybe I'll put it in my suitcase.

Climate refugee at sea

2010-06-09T08:51:00.005+02:00

BBC Earth News reports that the grey whale sighted last month off the coast of Israel has now been spotted off Barcelona by members of Submon, a divers club from Catalonia.

The BBC reports that Nicola Hodgins of the Whales and Dolphins Conservation Society (WDCS) says she believes the whales' next logical step would be to turn North after passing the strait of Gibraltar, and continue along the coasts of France and the UK.

But I think something very cool the whale could do instead is to head South, and turn up at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Agadir, Morocco in two weeks time.

The only logical explanation to the presence of this grey whale in the Mediterranean continues to be that it is a climate refugee, lost after entering the recently opened Arctic North West passage, as I wrote on 12 May here Chez Rémi.

Keys

2010-06-08T09:16:00.009+02:00

The Chairman of the International Whaling Commission, Cristian Maquieira has written an interesting piece on the BBC Green Room. Titled "Decision time for whale conservation", the piece published yesterday evening focusses on the package deal under consideration in the next two weeks at the meeting of the Whaling Commission, which I will be attending.

I picked up a few interesting sentences from Maquieira's piece:

"What we are seeking by bringing all whaling under the control of the IWC is to reduce significantly the number of whales killed and to promote whale conservation, especially of the most endangered species and including support for whale sanctuaries."

Support for whale sanctuaries is good and essential. Currently Japanese whaling operations are taking place within the boundaries of the Southern Ocean sanctuary. Bringing an end to whaling in the Southern Ocean is certainly the first key to turning the Agadir negotiation into a sucessful outcome.

[See my own BBC op-ed on this subject, last year. The situation has no changed much, except that it's hard to conceive that a decision could be postponed yet again this month]

"It is now time for governments to speak together about what they are ready to achieve collectively. The lively discussion that has ensued since the vice-chair and I issued our proposal is exactly what we wanted and what we expected."

With different words, Maquieira is in some way saying something similar to what I said in my own op-ed published by EFE this week: the 22nd April proposal tabled by Maquieira and his Co-Chair caused the perfect storm. It is now up to the crew on board the IWC vessel to navigate carefully in choppy sea, stay on course, and avoid a collision. And also to make sure that they reach port while the tide is high. After this month's meeting, it will be low tide, and it would be much more difficult to navigate safely. The willingness of all, but first and foremost Japan and the other two whaling countries, to be smooth is another key to success in Agadir.

"In the 21st Century, international policy cannot be well-informed and effective without public accountability and the engagement of civil society. If any of the different stakeholders feel we have not given them a fair hearing, we are bound for failure".

Right. Our friends from the environmental and animal welfare NGOs will like that. But Civil Society is not a monolithic entity. The representatives of the whalers are also part of it. And the degree to which they're willing to be reasonable and stop putting in a corner the governments to which they belong will be another key to the success of Agadir. Or to its failure.

Whaling paradoxes

2010-06-07T12:05:00.005+02:00

If you can read Spanish, you'll be interested to read my opinion piece the Spanish news agency EFE has just published.

The title, Paradojas Balleneras refers to three paradoxes we're all faced with in the middle of the international negotiations over the reform of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which is programmed to conclude this month:

Paradox 1: The moratorium on commercial whaling adopted in the 1980s was a great success, but the last whaling countries are now taking advantage of it to escape from IWC control.

Paradox 2: In order to reinforce the moratorium, should exemptions be authorized?

Paradox 3: In order to calm the game, is it right to twist the arms of the players?

The IWC is still in the middle of a perfect storm caused by the proposal tabled by its Chair and Vice-Chair in the month of April as a basis for negotiation. It is still early to say whether the storm will help the IWC vessel getting into port. Or if it will derail it. Or even crash it into an iceberg or a rock.

My piece is featured on EFE Verde, the new environmental service launched a few months ago by the Spanish news agency that reaches out in particular to Latin America and Spain. EFE Verde is a great concept, and a great tool to monitor environmental trends, policy and perceptions in the Spanish-speaking world.

Yes we kan

2010-06-04T08:34:00.005+02:00

The appointment today of Naoto Kan as the new Prime Minister of Japan is probably not a bad thing in the context of this month's whaling negotiations in Morocco.

Kan's administration offers some continuity with the Hatoyama administration which has been actively involved in the whale talks in the last 9 months.

Before Hatoyama's resignation there was concern that it would be hard for the former Prime Minister's extremely weakened cabinet to move on a meaningful whale conservation deal.

But now with Kan, there is a Prime Minister as strong as one could hope in the present circumstances.

Of course whales are not on top of the Prime Minister's agenda. Despite conventional belief in the West, the whaling issue in Japan is largely seen as unimportant, and most Japanese people do not really care about whether they kan or kannot eat whale meat. But exactly for this reason, whales kan be for the new Prime Minister of Japan a relatively easy way to send a positive message to the rest of the world.

Japan's whaling policy largely results from the lack of accountability and transparency of Japan's Fisheries Agency. It is good that Prime Minister Kan has a reputation for standing up to bureaucrats. And for wanting to cut the public deficit. Thus, domestically also the whale negotiations kan help the new Prime Minister deliver his programme.

I kan't help it. I've got to stay optimstic.

Beyond principles

2010-06-01T10:07:00.013+02:00

Because it took me two evenings to find the book on the photo, I keep thinking that I should really find the time to clean up the mess on the numerous bookshelves I've got at home and in the office.

The book I was looking for is a 1989 publication called "The Greenpeace Story." The page on the photo shows me with two other Greenpeace colleagues in 1982 at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) the night after the moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted. The caption says: "Success Hans Guyt (left), John Frizell and Remi Parmentier are delighted by the IWC vote."

I clearly remember the time this photo was taken nearly thirty years ago, many drinks after the IWC adopted the resolution that started the moratorium on commercial whaling. It was in July 1982 in Brighton, England. What the IWC decided on that day was a moratorium effective only four years later, after the 1985-86 whaling season. And yet all the environmentalists who were there did celebrate. I don't recall anyone suggesting at the time (or even now) that we'd sold out to whaling interests, and the moratorium on commercial whaling is widely perceived as one of the landmark victories of the global environmntal movement.

This is a point I made last week in Paris, at a consultation organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs where the French Government delegation to the IWC was seeking views as to whether it was okay to give consideration to exemptions to the moratorium on commercial whaling. The IWC starts meeting in two weeks in Agadir, Morocco, and the main dish on the menu is the so-called package deal which as it is everyone (whalers and anti-whalers alike) is opposing.

I don't think there should be a deal at any cost. But if a deal means that there is a way to end whaling in the Southern ocean, to restrict whale meat consumption to local communities in the countries where whaling is still taking place in some shape or form, to put whaling back under the control of the IWC and its Revised Management Procedure as it was published almost a decade ago, to prevent the commercial killing of vulnerable species, to end the abuse of the IWC treaty Article VIII clause which Japan says it allows them to decide which whales and how many they can take if they allege it's for scientific research, if everyone agrees in good faith and says they won't object to the deal or any parts of it; if all these conditions are fulfilled (what with Greenpeace, Pew and WWF we call the Six Fundamental Elements), then I think there can be a deal. It does not mean there will be celebrations in Agadir (as we wrote in April, no-one enjoys eating rats), but if these conditions are fulfilled, the situation would considerably be improved, I think.

The odds are not very good though, because of course for all sides it's easier to retreat and to maintain their principles. But would that be the best thing for whales in the water? And would it have been right to reject the moratorium resolution in 1982, on the basis that it was going to be effective only several years later?

Lab Earth

2010-05-23T10:02:00.014+02:00

I watched the other day with my 18 year old daughter the film Blade Runner, which I had not seen since I'd watched it in a London West End cinema when it first came out in the early 1980s. When the film began, my daughter giggled because she thought it was amusing to see how Ridley Scott and his team had envisaged thirty years ago that the world in 2019 (tomorrow, that is for my daughter) would look more like a laboratory that's gone out of control than like a living planet.

Well, I'm sorry for my daughter but it looks like humankind may have made a giant step towards Blade Runner last week, with Craig Venter's synthetic life première announcement.

Besides all the obvious bioethical issues the announcement is raising, there is also a host of fundamental environmental questions that Richard Black addressed quite comprehensively on Friday in his blog.

Among the numerous issues raised, I'd been wondering for a while why well publicized plans to artificially develop algae thought to be liable to absorb CO2 (one of the most immediate objectives of Craig Venter's research programme in partnership with Exxon) and to be also a source of algae fuel are not causing more public debate.

A Draft Decision proposed for adoption at this year's Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) scheduled to take place in October in Nagoya, Japan contemplates the adoption of a moratorium. See draft Article 5(t) of the Draft Decision "In-Depth Review of The Work on Biodiversity and Climate Change":

"Ensure, [...] in accordance with the precautionary approach, that no climate related geo-engineering activities take place until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts."

In the Draft Decision moved at last week's meeting of the CBD's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Techonological Advice (SBSTTA) Article 5(t) is in square brackets. In UN language, this means that there is no consensus, and that it will not be adopted in October unless civil society moves fast and campaigns effectively for its adoption.

On this International Year of Biodiversity, the United Nations and governments are having a hard time explaining why they've failed (as demonstrated in the Global Biodiversity Outlook report that was just published) to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss by 2010 as had been agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. In this context, the adoption of a moratorium on geo-engineering would be a golden opportunity to mask this failure and to demonstrate that the Convention on Biological Diversity still has an effective role to play.

Greenprice

2010-05-22T14:24:00.026+02:00

Hace un par de semanas, encontré por pura casualidad este artículo publicado por el diario español ABC hace hoy exactamente 30 años, el 22 de Mayo de 1980, un día o dos después de que yo anunciase en rueda de prensa, en nombre de Greenpeace, nuestra intención de zarpar con el Rainbow Warrior para aguas españolas para oponernos a la caza ballenera.

¿Greenpeace? o ¿Greenprice? La falta de ortografía en el titular y a lo largo del artículo es un buen recordatorio de que a los pioneros de Greenpeace nos costaba no sólo hacernos oir, si no también darnos a conocer. En aquel entonces, Greenpeace no era una tarjeta de presentación que permitía, como hoy, abrir todas las puertas. Para empezar en muchos paises teníamos que deletrear el nombre de nuestra organización y explicar que (y qué) significaba "Paz Verde". Y como veis, aún así algunos periodistas metian la pata.

Un mes después de esta rueda de prensa, dos buques de la armada española nos apresaron en alta mar y nos detuvieron con el Rainbow Warrior durante varios meses en la darsena militar de Ferrol, a petición de la empresa Industrias Balleneras SA por habernos colocado en lanchas neumaticas delante de sus arponeros.

Pero el tiro les salió por la culata: en Ferrol el Rainbow Warrior era una especie de Caballo de Troya con el cual muchos españoles pudieron familiarizarse con nosotros, y desde el cual pudimos familiarizarnos con este extraño país en transición hacia la democracia después de cerca de 40 años de dictadura. En bastante poco tiempo, la gente se enteraba por los medios de comunicación de qué eran "los Grinpis", y (aunque la ortografía podia aun ser deficiente) a nadie se le ocurrio volver a llamarnos "los Greenprice". De repente, la existencia de una flota ballenera española satellite del Japón (toda la carne de ballena se exportaba a aquel país) empezó a ser una carga para esa España que aspiraba a ser homologada como socio europeo. Un año después de los acontecimientos de Ferrol, el Gobierno español tuvo que empezar a tomar más en serio sus obligaciones como miembro de la Comisión Ballenera International y obligaron a los balleneros a respetar cuotas. Control tras control, salió a la luz que la empresa ballenera llevaba una doble contabilidad de las cantidades de carne de ballena que salian para el Japón, y se dijó que -- cómo en el caso de Al Capone -- la Hacienda Pública se interesó de cerca al tema. España tuvo también que cerrar el puerto de Las Palmas a buques-factoria piratas que tenían por costumbre mandar desde las Islas Canarias al Japón miles de toneladas de carne de ballena de contrabando.

El resto es Historia. En 1982, España votó finalemente a favor de la moratoria mundial sobre la caza ballenera comercial que se adoptó aquel año. También en 1982, ya no eramos unos desconocidos en este país y recibimos un apoyo sin precedente de la opinión pública española (pescadores gallegos incluidos) en nuestra campaña contra las operaciones de vertidos radioactivos que cada verano llevaban a cabo varios paises europeos en el Atlántico. Sería el último año que se uso la fosa Atlantica como basurero nuclear. En 1983 trabajamos con la recien estrenada administración de Felipe Gonzalez y con otros paises hasta conseguir ése año una moratoria sobre los vertidos radiactivos en todo el mundo. Diez años después, en 1993 conseguimos que esa moratoria fuese permanente después una ardua y larga campaña política que me tocó coordinar.

Cuando me preguntan sobre los primeros tiempos de Greenpeace, acostumbro a contestar que antes de ser una organización, eramos una tribu, lo cual tenía ventajas e inconvenientes. En 1984 me tocó reunir a unos cuantos ecologistas españoles con quienes formamos Greenpeace-España formalmente. Un año después, el atentado criminal perpetuado contra el Rainbow Warrior por los servicios secretos franceses nos precipitó en la edad adulta. Aunque (cómo está bien conocido) no todas las luchas tribales dentro de Greenpeace se extinguiesen por acto de magia.

El 22 de mayo de 1980, no se celebraba el Dia Internacional de la Biodiversidad, por supuesto. Nadie conocía esta palabra ya que apareció por primera vez aquel año en una publicación científica. Es interesante notar que hoy, treinta años más tarde Televisión Española destaca cómo la conservación de los cetáceos genera grandes ganancias en las Islas Canarias, cómo en otros puntos de la geografía española y del mundo. Como yo escribí hace tres años durante una visita a la isla de Tenerife: "Cuando yo navegué por primera vez (a bordo del Rainbow Warrior) en aguas españolas, la Ley defendía exclusivamente a los balleneros, y castigaba a los que (cómo yo y mis colegas de entonces) querían proteger a las ballenas. Pero una generación y media más tarde ha tenido lugar un cambio de paradigma total. Algo digno de celebrar."

Whales' wealth

2010-05-21T17:58:00.005+02:00

Tomorrow, 22nd of May, has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day of Biodiversity. So it's quite appropriate that I'm writing this piece surrounded with frogs and colibris in a park in Santo Domingo de Heredia, Costa Rica.

I'm also surrounded with representatives of the governments of the so-called Buenos Aires Group of Latin American countries who've been meeting here this week to discuss their strategy, four weeks before the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Since 2005, the Buenos Aires Group (now made up of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Venezuela) coordinates the position of its members at the IWC. Latin America acts as a block to promote the end of scientific whaling by Japan in the IWC-designated Southern Ocean sanctuary, and to propose the establishment of an other international whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic.

This year's International Day of Biodiversity is dedicated to Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation, a theme which is at the heart of the work of the Buenos Aires Group. The Latin American countries object to the fact that a distant fleet that belongs to one of the richest countries on Earth sails annually across the globe to depossess developing countries of whales whose migration from Antarctica to the Latin American shores brings to local populations increasing wealth and other benefits and opportunities for sustainable development, including tourism.

In the last 25 years, pursuant to the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling which entered into force in 1986 and thanks also to the rise of democracy and public participation in decision-making, Latin America has seen a paradigm shift which has transformed the region (formerly a satellite for Japanese-controlled land-based whaling factories established in the corrupt military dictatorships of Brasil, Chile and Peru) into the host of a flowerishing whale watching industry of great benefit for sustainbale development.

Pro-whaling advocates argue that whaling and whale-watching can co-exist side-by-side. In Western countries, urban families may take kids to visit cattle farms and enjoy a burger the next minute, so what's the difference? they say. The difference is that the Buenos Aires Group and other anti-whaling countries consider that whale watching is their management option, and that whaling interests should not fiddle with it. Experts in cetacean behaviour also strongly object to the notion that whaling and whale watching can co-exist: according to their observations whales used to the presence of innocent whale watching vessels become easier preys for the whaling boats, and -- on the opposite -- whale pods aware of the existence of whaling vessels become fearful and elusive to whale watching boats.

Whales on thin ice

2010-05-12T20:46:00.018+02:00

When I first saw on Monday the truly amazing story on the BBC website about a grey whale sighted in the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel, I was not sure what to say because it was so strange. Atlantic grey whales have been extinct since the XVIIth or XVIIIth century, and whales are not exactly small deepsea organisms that can pass unnoticed.

For me this story was just mind blowing. As weird as if someone announced they'd photographed a Dodo, it was like a belated April Fools Day stunt. Until I read Kieran Mulvaney's blog yesterday, where he explained that this whale is likely to be a victim of climate change. The most credible explanation, Kieran says, is that this grey whale would likely have got lost after entering the Arctic North West passage recently open as a result of ice melting induced by climate change.

Kieran does not explain why the whale was not sighted before it showed up off Tel Aviv a few days ago. But of course the weather and visibility have been rough this winter. And not every man on the bridge of ships can tell the difference between a sperm and a grey whale, or even a fin whale.

I'm sure there are plenty of plans now to monitor and watch the lost whale, wherever it decides to go. I hope some authorities are doing something to restrict the abundance of film crews and whale watchers who could disrupt the already stressed animal. But in a way it is good to see how the contemporary approach to natural science has evolved in modern days: not many decades ago the first thing scientists had done in such circumstances would have been to harpoon or shoot the poor thing.

[As a matter of fact, it is the existence in the first half of the XXth century of a "Discovery Committee" that prompted in 1946 the negotiators of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (which still governs the International Whaling Commission more than 60 years later) to adopt the now infamous clause (Article VIII) authorizing unilateral "scientific" whaling which the Japanee Fisheries Agency has been alleging to for two decades in order to circumvent the moratorium on commercial whaling. Article VIII was meant to let scientists catch a specimen or two in the event that a new species or rare animal was found; it was never meant to be a cover-up à la japonaise]

It's an interesting coincidence also to see this mysterious grey whale showing up only five weeks before the crucial annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission where a decision on the [no-] future of whaling is expected. Opponents to whaling argue for extreming precaution because no-one can really tell what is the future of whales in an environment bound to suffer increased environmental stress from climate change (including ocean acidification, changes in temperatures, water currents and salinity, etc.) and other human-induced environmental harms (fisheries by-catch and entanglement in nets, ship strikes, noise and toxic pollution, habitat disruption, etc.)

In a way the discovery of this grey whale emphasizes this message. It's only too bad that she swam all the way from the Pacific and came so close to Agadir, Morocco where the meeting of the IWC will take place next month, but missed it. Nice try, though.

Mr. Goodfish

2010-05-10T12:35:00.006+02:00

France's Le Monde published on Friday an interesting article (page 6) about the response of an increasing number of French Chefs to a pilot project called Mr. Goodfish on environmental aspects of seafood consumption(available in English, French, Spanish, Galician and Italian).

Safety and Security (floating or sinking?)

2010-05-03T16:42:00.024+02:00

I wonder what the delegates at the Review Conference of Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which begins today in New York think of current discussions within the shipping sector about building nuclear-powered merchant ships.

We addressed some of the safety aspects of this issue, here Chez Rémi when the CEO of the COSCO Group, the largest shipping conglomerate in the world, made in December last year a passionate plea for the development of nuclear-powered merchant fleets. But what about the security implications? What's at stake for the non-nuclear proliferation regime if one day dozens, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear-powered merchant vessels routinely sailed accross the oceans of the world, including through unsafe straits, channels and canals?

A new piece "Going Fission - Exploring the Potential for Nuclear-Powered Merchant Ships" has just been published on the website of the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO).

Of course there is at the end of the article a footnote that says "Feature articles written by outside contributors do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of BIMCO", and obviously nuclear-powered merchant vessels aren't ready to be launched in the immediate future. However, Mike Corkhill, the author of the article reports that "in the past two years several classification societies have launched technical investigations into the potential for applying nuclear power to a new generation of merchant ships. The early focus of this work has been on propulsion units for tankers, bulk carriers, container ships and cruise ships, but it is acknowledged that other ship types are also potential beneficiaries of the nuclear option." And experience with other issues also shows that the more vested interests are created and maintained through R&D contracts (public, semi-public as well as private) the more it becomes difficult to stop a train -- even a mad train, like for example the plans to dispose of high-level radioactive wastes under the seabed in the high seas in the 1970s and 1980s: even though this practice was officially ruled out and banned worldwide by treaty in 1993 a quick google search shows that the promotion of, and research into this option hasn't been completely halted.

This month's NPT Review Conference should be more interesting than the last previous ones which took place in 2000 and 2005 respectively. I'm curious to see how this, the first NPT Review Conference under the Obama administration, develops (Iran crisis notwithstanding).

Rebecca Johnson, Director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy has sent me the link to her briefings for this session.

Rebecca says she's blogging during the four-week meeting. Knowing Rebecca well, I'm sure it will be a blog for international policy junkies-only. But because I know there are quite a few of them among our regular visitors here Chez Rémi, I thought I'd mention it.

[See, in particular Rebecca's A Nuclear Weapons Convention - Now we Can]

Hot topic

2010-04-30T11:18:00.004+02:00

In the middle of this week marked by the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion in the Ukraine, Lloyd's List has announced that Russia is in the process of building a prototype floating nuclear power station for deployment in the Arctic.

It's in Lloyd's List Hot Topics section. This is encouraging because for a long while I've been wondering (and I continue to wonder) why this issue is not on the hot topics list of environmental organizations.

[For futher details, click on Floating Nuclear Reactors and Arctic Grab in the right-hand column, Blog Contents section of this blog]

Vote

2010-04-26T12:34:00.004+02:00

29 April is the final day to cast votes for this year's Webby Awards.

I just casted three votes. One for Tcktcktck, the campaign I worked for last year in the run-up to Copenhagen (Best Activism Website category). One for 350.org's motivating Because the World needs to Know (Best Video for Public Service and activism category). And Greenpeace's inspiring Love Letters to the Future (Best Green Website category).

If you want to join and vote, it's really easy with the user-friendly instructions on the Tcktcktck website.

No rat for dinner (tonight)

2010-04-23T16:55:00.014+02:00

The other day, I found two dead rats in my garden, and I thought I'd dress a table to take this photo. The idea was that I might soon need this photo to evoke Geoffrey Palmer's warning at the beginning of the Small Working Group of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which I attended in Florida last month. Geoffrey, who was chairing the meeting, said in his opening remarks that for the negotiation to be successful, everyone at the end of it would need to have the feeling that they'd all been eating a rat together. It was Geoffrey's way of saying that if everyone, whalers and anti-whalers, really wanted to reach an agreement they would all have to give something away: some of their respective principles, some of their revenues and routine, some of their pride, etc.

Sixty days before the annual meeting of the IWC, yesterday was the deadline when a proposal had to be tabled for consideration this year. Last week, a 12-country Chair's Support Group had failed to reach a consensus that could be transmited to the annual meeting for its consideration, and instead the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Commission were asked to put forward a proposal. In the preceding 48 hours, some started to say they were smelling a rat, because informally the IWC Secretariat kept delaying the time at which they thought the proposal would be ready. Finally they settled for 22h00 UK time.

Everyone within the conservation community was disappointed when the proposal came through. The document is made up of 43 pages, but the priority focus of attention was Table 4 on page 15 and 16 with the proposed catch limits for the next ten years. The biggest disappointment is that the proposal contemplates a continuation of whaling inside the internationally agreed Southern Ocean sanctuary, where the Japanese whaling fleet has been defying the international community in the last 20 years with so-called scientific whaling activities. A phase down of the catches of minke whales is proposed, from 400 per year at the beginning to 200 per year at the end of the ten-year interim period covered by the "package". But there is a footnote (7) that suggests that annual catches could be much higher if in the preceding years, the fleet does not manage to fulfill this catch limit, for whatever reason. Even worst, Table 4 also suggests that the Japanese fleet could be allowed to catch ten fin whales (an endangered species) per year in the next two seasons, and then continue catching five per year until 2020. The document (including Table 4) contains other problematic elements, concerning -- among others -- Iceland's and Norway's whaling operations, several aspects of the proposed Japanese coastal whaling operations, uncertainties as to whether the international trade in whale meat will be prohibited, etc. At all costs, conservationists want to maintain the integrity of the moratorium on commercial whaling agreed in 1982, and of the Southern Ocean Sanctuary agreed in 1994. Condemnation by countries like New Zealand who had put high hopes in this process came very fast.

So, game over? I don't think so. No rat for dinner tonight. Not yet, at least. The structure of the IWC has similarities with the United Nations during the old Cold War era, and the proposal we've seen yesterday reflects this political reality. The current Chair of the IWC who co-authored the proposal, Cristian Maqueira from Chile comes from a country and a region that strongly opposes whaling, whereas the Vice-Chair, Antony Liverpool from the Caribbean nation of Antigua & Barbura has very strong ties with Japan's whaling interests (whatever is the reason). So, it would have been naive to expect that both of them alone could have sorted the IWC mess which no-one has managed to undo in more than 20 years.

What they've produced is presented as a basis for negotiation at the annual meeting in June. Read carefully what they say in the introduction, page 2 and 3:

"For the purposes of allowing for continued discussion, we have put in some example numbers in Table 4 [...] at this stage we have included a two-step decline in Antarctic minke whale catches [...] this is neither a continuous decline nor a stable limit [...] the only inevitable result of the example numbers we have inclued in Table 4 is that as a package they will [be] disliked by all for one reason or another, including ourselves. They are merely there to stimulate the necessary intense discussions and negotiations prior to Agadir [...] the text in the present document [...] represent[s] a starting point for further discussions and negotiations rather than a firm proposal". And they add: "Almost inevitably, there is a tendency for Governments of all persuasions to take the position that 'we' have given up more than 'them'. This is inevitable and natural." [emphasis added).

I'll undress my rat dinner table for now. But just in case, I'll keep it in the fridge.

Tobacco environment

2010-04-22T14:47:00.008+02:00

Clif sent me a Grist Earth Day opinion piece published today which frames the Ban the Butts campaign he is involved in developing. The message is simple: not only is it lethal for humans to smoke tobacco cigarettes, but it's really bad for the natural environment too; if you don't see a need to quit for your lungs, quit for Mother Earth.

This reminded me of the Tobacco Police in the centre of Tokyo, where smoking in the streets is prohibited (except in specially designated little ghettos where smokers gather around huge outdoor ashtrays). Aged policemen patrol the streets of the Shinjuku business area to remind smokers that they can be fined if found smoking in the streets.

Whenever I can, I take photos of Tokyo tobacco policemen because I find them kind of cool in a way. But the paradox is that Tokyo has one of the most permissive indoor tobacco control regulations; even today it's hard to find a non-smoking table in the city's restaurants and bars.

Half full, Half empty

2010-04-16T11:39:00.004+02:00

I'm receiving a lot of requests for comments about this week's meeting of the Chair's Support Group of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which has been meeting in Washington DC this week.

I'm telling everyone that I want to be very careful with what I say, because it's tough to determine whether a glass is half full or half empty. And of course, it's almost impossible to say before you've tasted it whether the beverage in the glass tastes good, or even if it's drinkable. And the compromise proposal due to be tabled at the next annual meeting of the IWC won't be made public for another few days.

I expect I'll have more to say soon. Meanwhile I recommend Richard Black's piece from last night. As always, Richard is very sobber when he writes. A number of details (and other aspects) are missing of course, but it remains an excellent account of where we're at.

It's the gastronomy, stupid

2010-04-10T13:01:00.008+02:00

Inevitably, a week in Tokyo always has a lot to do with food.

Not only because the issues that bring me here rarely haven't got to do with living marine resources conservation. But also because the majority of the city's restaurants and food stores are an aventure for one's Western taste buds and eyes.

Here this week I coincidentally ran into Patrick Ramage of IFAW who took me to his favorite Tokyo restaurant, called Kaikaya by the Sea a few blocks from Shibuya square.

A very nice, crowded place with excellent cuisine japonaise. But what I found most remarkable, and unusual in Japan (or in most fish restaurants in the world), was the decoration with slogans that looked almost like the walls of a Greenpeace office. See this photo for example:

No Ocean ---> No Earth
---> No Fish
---> No Life
---> No Kaikaya ---> No Money
No heaven <----

Very good: with these seven words, the restaurant manager captures the essence of environmental economics (and environmental ethics -- that's the heaven bit), all put very simply.

I was told the manager can't guarantee that all the fish he cooks and sells is from sustainable harvesting, but he's trying. And if it was more readily available, that'd be his choice. Of course, because no fish ---> no life ---> no money ---> no heaven. Hell!

Japan is hosting this year in Nagoya the Conference of Parties to the Conference on Biological Diversity. Maybe the Kaikasa manager with his blackboard should be invited as a keynote speaker on Day 1 of the conference.

[I'm glad I've written this post, because next time I'm in Tokyo I wont need to chase up Patrick to ask him to remind me the name and location of this place]

Doha's Diary

2010-03-31T19:55:00.007+02:00

After reading my post from yesterday here Chez Rémi, Roberto Mielgo kindly asked me permission to reproduce it in his Doha's Diary.

Roberto and MarViva are doing a really good job putting all these stories and analyses in one central place. As time passes and the dust settles, when the CITES conference will be not so fresh, it will be very handy to know that we can find Roberto's great collection of commentaries and analysis on his Fresh from Qatar website.

With Roberto's permission, maybe I can make one suggestion. It would be really good to also include commentaries and press reports from Japan. I've seen a few and they're quite instructive. You can't do Aikido if you don't know what's in the other guy's mind. Roberto could post them in the original language. And those who don't read Japanese could use Google Translator or Babelfish or other online tools that are helpful to at least get a sense.

The whaler wears no clothes

2010-03-30T17:08:00.005+02:00

I told Sue Lieberman yesterday that I was not sure if Charles Clover's Pearl Harbour analogy in The Sunday Times to describe the bullying by Japan of this month's CITES conference would hit the right chord in Tokyo. She said, "probably not, but it certainly felt that way".

Although there are differences of opinion on whether it is right (and productive) to draw a straight parallel between the current debate over the conservation and management of Atlantic bluefin tuna and the decades-old whale conservation policy debate, it's hard not to note the similarities of Japan's political strategy at CITES this month with this country's past approach at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) as The Guardian pointed out a few days ago.

The Atlantic bluefin tuna has been brought to the brink of extinction in the last decade by increased worldwide human consumption driven by a combination of factors including high consumer demand in Japan and elsewhere, unsustainable subsidies in the European Union, and poor enforcement of catch limits and other regulations around the Mediterranean Sea.

The proposal to put Atlantic bluefin tuna on CITES’ “black list” of species that cannot be traded internationally, sponsored by the Principality of Monaco and supported by the United States and the European Union among others, was largely seen as a last ditch opportunity to save this iconic species which has been a source of food and wealth for the people of the Mediterranean for thousands of years.

It was also hoped that Japan as well would see the proposed trade ban as a long term opportunity, because – as the worldwide fisheries crisis continues to unfold – the outlook is bleak for this country’s feeding patterns largely dependent on the availability and supply of marine resources. For example, a study published in 2003 in the scientific literature suggests that up to 90% of the biomass from large predator fish species has already vanished (download the large Pdf file if you want to see the whole report). So, in short, it was hoped that Japan would agree to a measure that could reduce its supply in the short and medium term, because it would be immensely beneficial to Japanese food security in the longer term. But Japan favored short term corporate benefit instead, and bullied the CITES Convention.

Of course, it is not the first time Japan takes the risk of tarnishing its international reputation amid a controversy about the use and conservation of marine resources. Whaling is the most obvious case that comes first to mind. Japan has been taking heat for nearly 40 years since the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held in 1972 called for a moratorium on commercial whaling, an activity Japan is currently the only country in the world to carry out in the high seas. Ten years after the 1972 conference, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) established a legally-binding moratorium, but Japan has always found ways and pretexts to evade and to continue killing whales. Japan’s most contentious whaling operation takes place every year in the Southern Seas – a whale sanctuary or no-take zone for whales recognized by the international community with the exception of Japan whose factory ship has been targeting a growing number of nearly 2000 whales annually in recent years. Our contemporaries in Japan have lost their apetite for whale meat, but the Japanese Fisheries Agency continues to subsidize the whaling at great expense, even though there is reportedly a big stockpile of unsold frozen whale meat in the country.

In the last three years however, the Japanese administration showed signs of willing to seek a compromise whereby they would accept to respect international law and regulations if in exchange they were allowed to carry out what they call small-type coastal whaling. Whether this would mean that Japan would accept to stop catching whales in the Southern Ocean sanctuary and elsewhere in the high seas is still subject to negotiations within the framework of the IWC. It is hoped that this will be clarified before this year’s IWC annual meeting in Morocco in June. Japanese officials now recognize that their past whaling activities were unsustainable and caused irreversible damage to the whale resources. They’ve repeatedly pledged that they would limit and control whale catches to “sustainable levels.”

Until now, a significant number of countries within the IWC have shown some sympathy for Japan’s “sustainable whaling” claims. And some that traditionally oppose commercial whaling, like New Zealand for example have made real efforts to try to accommodate Japan’s concerns in a bid to bring whaling back into international control and to eliminate whaling in the Southern Ocean. These “whale peace talks” are due to conclude in three months in Morocco at the end of June, but now the joint Japan-Libyan coup d’état against the CITES Convention might have brought a blow to the willingness of the IWC to believe Japan’s “sustainable whaling” claim. Japan’s coup at CITES reminds the worst acrimonious times in the past history of the IWC, and it’s almost impossible not to extrapolate. Under IWC rules, a population of whales brought down to 15% of its original size would automatically be protected and any catch would be banned. 15% is what is thought to be left of the Atlantic bluefin tuna’s pre-industrial fishing population, so why did Japan so adamantly campaign to prevent a trade ban that would have eased the pressure on the species? If this is the vision of sustainable management and good marine stewardship of Japan, do they also have a hidden agenda with the “whale peace talks”? Unless it does something drastic before the IWC meeting in June, the risk is for Japan to be seen like the whaler with no clothes.

[To make that point, maybe the environmental NGO observers at the IWC should all take off their clothes at the opening of the meeting]

The Japanese Government has only a few weeks left to prove that it genuinely wants a truly sustainable whale deal at the IWC this year, and that it will not bully the IWC in Morocco like it just did with CITES in Doha. The most obvious way to restore trust would be for the Japanese Government to announce its willingness to give up its costly high seas whaling operation in the Southern Seas. This would be an effective confidence-building move, and one that could benefit to the Japanese coastal communities who catch whales on the Japanese shore and are presently suffering from the unfair competition of the heavily subsidized high seas operation in the Southern Seas. In the event that the IWC would agree that some coastal whaling could take place in line with recommendations from its Scientific Committee and in recognition for Japan’s effort to move out of the Southern Seas, it would be a win-win for the Japanese Government: it would preserve local whaling traditions and eliminate a highly costly and unnecessary high seas whaling operation.

Wake up

2010-03-18T23:53:00.020+01:00

After reading Charles Clover's account of today's bluefin tuna debacle at the CITES conference in Doha, I wondered what I could say that others weren't saying.

What photo should I upload to illustrate this environmental tragedy? Today on (ironically) the third month of the UN International Year of Biodiversity?

Well, I thought I'd upload this photo I took recently in Tokyo metro. And those curious to know why the Japanese people (and the rest of the world for that matter) are sleeping and do not revolt against the looming food security crisis that the destruction of marine life means for them, I encourage you to read "Japanese Journalism in Collapse", an interesting interview with Takashi Uesugi which David McNeill, a Tokyo-based Irish journalist, has just published on the website of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. It does not contain the whole explanation of course, but I suppose part of it is there.

In the month of October, the Japanese Government will be hosting in the city of Nagoya the 10th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which will be preceded (on 20 September in New York) by the first-ever special meeting of the UN General Assembly on biodiversity conservation, with participation of Heads of States and Governments.

The UN continues to say that they're "celebrating" on this Year of Biodiversity. Well, they've only got six months left to make sure that there's something to celebrate and to avoid a total disaster. Six months for Japan, and the rest of the world, to get their acts together.

Trade and Values

2010-03-13T00:06:00.022+01:00

What would happen if in the duty-free area of any international airport, perfect reproductions of machine guns and hand grenades were put on sale for passengers just about to board their planes? Reproductions that would look so real that it'd be enough to give a heart attack to a flight attendant on any airplane, or a nervous breakdown to all the passengers of a 747?

Well, that's the question I'm asking myself each time I pass by the Becara shop at Terminal 4 of Madrid Barajas airport, where reproductions of all sorts of banned wildlife items are on display for sale.

The photo is not very clear because the manager of the shop tried to prevent me from taking it. But if you put your curser and click on it, you will see what I'm talking about: I've circled in red whale bones, turtle shells, and a saw fish.

All these items have something in common. The international trade of the species represented is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) whose Conference of Parties is just about to begin this week-end in Doha, Qatar. But this does not seem to trouble the Spanish airport authority who host the Becara shop.

Like the rest of the European Union and 174 other countries, Spain is a Party to the CITES Convention. [Ironically, a few metres from the Becara shop at Terminal 4, there is a poster reminding passengers in transit from exotic countries that -- in accordance to the CITES Convention -- they cannot import goods made from endangered species]

Of course these are "just" reproductions, not real species samples(as far as I can tell, because when I started asking questions and tried to touch and photograph the stuff the manager asked me to leave). But for sure this display has no place in an international airport because it clearly promotes (at least indirectly) trade in endangered species: if you're attracted by that expensive kitsch junk, you surely wish you could get your hand on the real thing.

Many colleagues and friends are at the CITES meeting in the next two weeks, where the status of the Atlantic bluefin tuna will be the big issue. And when I passed by the shop at Terminal 4 this week, I was on my way to a workshop about sustainable consumption patterns in Germany where we discussed (among other items) the need and ways to accelerate cultural value changes.

Sexy

2010-03-03T15:03:00.011+01:00

Vassili Papastavrou of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has just asked me how many hits or visitors Chez Rémi gets everyday. So, I've thought I'd try to increase the number today, by giving this catchy title to this post. It's well known that, according to Internet statistics "sex" is by far the word people all over the world look for and click on the most on Google and other search engines. I suppose that by extension, the word "sexy" is a good magnet too. (Sorry, guys, if reading this piece feels like a coitus interruptus).

I'm in Florida this week, at a fairly small intersessional meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), where discussions are on-going on the future of what many world citizens consider (in the NGO jargon) sexy animals (iconic, that is).

The three-year process called "Future of the IWC" is reaching an end, with the next annual meeting of the whaling commission scheduled to take place in three months in Morocco.

This week's Small Working Group is looking at a "not agreed draft" available on the IWC website. The Secretariat has also posted on the website several useful documents, including the Power Point presentation used by the meeting's chairman yesterday to summarize the state of play so far, and the presentation by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand who chairs the so-called IWC Support Group which is trying to flesh out a compromise package liable to put the IWC on a new track.

As you can see, even though I'm in Florida, I'm not exactly having fun this week (no sex either of course). But no-one among the governments represented here rules out that there could be a breakthrough in whale conservation in the next three months. And that would be exciting.

Cancun helping hand

2010-02-09T22:34:00.009+01:00

I would never have thought that I'd ever be inspired by Sarah Palin. But she's managed, cute little thing! With her helping hand at the tea party.

Now I know what needs to be done to avoid another fiasco at the next Climate Summit in Cancun, Mexico at the end of this year.

When they register at the conference centre and go through all the usual (and unusual) security formalities, all delegates (including Ministers,and Heads of State and Government) should show their left hand, and four bullet points should be printed on it:

* Below 2 degrees Celsius

* 350 ppm

* 30% GHG emission cut (by 2020)

* 1990 baseline

Thanks, Sarah.

Last week in Tokyo, I took out for dinner Karen Sack, the Director of the Pew Marine Programme after she'd just flown to Japan for the first time in her life.

The restaurant I'd thought I'd bring her to was full, and so were about ten others we tried in the area near our hotel. Finally we found one that was totally empty. We had no idea of what was on the menu because it was all written in Japanese (as you would expect in Tokyo), but we sat there and asked if they had an English or a picture menu. It was at that point we discovered it was a whale meat restaurant. We left (with delightful education), and ended up at the last available table of a restaurant I knew across the road, which serves delicious tofu dishes.

What's interesting about this anecdote is that the whale restaurant was the only one that was empty in the entire area. I think it was a good real-life confirmation of the fact that whale meat is not popular in Japan. As David McNeill, a Tokyo-based Irish journalist wrote recently in the UK's Independent newspaper, "although some middle-aged citizens remain fond of it, most youngsters would rather eat almost anything else". There are very few whale meat restaurants in Tokyo, and even so, on that busy outing night when I took Karen out, they were empty.

One of the first successful efforts of real international lobbying I'd ever taken a lead for was a push in the second half of the 1970s, to ban the import of whale products into France (that was before an EU-wide ban on whale products were enacted, and also before the Parties to the CITES Convention banned the international trade in whale products). The issue in France was not whale meat, but whale fat and sperm whale spermaceti imported and used at the time by the French cosmetic industry. During this recent stay in Tokyo, where I've enjoyed otherwise excellent Japanese cuisine as always, I've been thinking that it was a good thing the international trade in whale products was banned three decades ago. Because now, with the popularity Japanese cuisine enjoys all over the world, it is possible that whale meat could have become fashionable from Fifth Avenue to the Champs Elysées or Shangai, and as a result the pressure on whale populations (as well as vested interested against the protection of whales) would have increased proportionately.

Pretty much the same that is happening now to the Atlantic bluefin tuna endangered by the globalization of sushi. A lesson from the past the advocates of the ban on the international trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna proposed at next month's CITES conference should highlight.

Fishheads against a wall

2010-01-28T04:53:00.010+01:00

I said yesterday that I would comment on the article in The Japan Times about blue fin tuna and whales.

In the article, a member of the Japan Tuna Fisheries Cooperative Association, Hisao Masuko, is reported as saying "If nothing is done, we won't have any tuna at Tsukiji fish market". If I understand the article correctly, when Mr. Masuko says "if nothing is done", he means "if nothing is done" to prevent the adoption of the proposed ban on the international trade in Atlantic blue fin tuna at the CITES conference in a few weeks in Doha. Not "if nothing is done" to conserve the species.

Well, if my business and my life were dependent in the long term on the availability of a resource, I think I'd accept the proposed embargo in order to be sure that the resource comes back in a few years, and that my business continues. There's no doubt that the Atlantic blue fin tuna case is compelling. It is a true tragedy for Japanese fisheries and consumers if this species disappears, not if the trade is halted to prevent the tragedy before it is too late. So, fisheries entrepreneurs and regulators should stop hitting their heads against a wall, act responsibly, and agree to conervation measures that are in their best long term interest.

To anyone interested in understanding the close linkages between the big Japanese fisheries private enterprises and the Fisheries Agency of Japan, I strongly recommend Professor Jun Morikawa's recent book "Whaling in Japan". I red the book and met Professor Morikawa recently in Japan, and I learned on many aspects of the issue which I did not know, or which I thought I knew but not quite.

What is most puzzling with the Fisheries Agency of Japan, is how it manages to maintain a Soviet-style central control on distant fisheries and whaling in a country which is otherwise the paradigm of economic liberalism.

However, I am encouraged to see, here in Tokyo, that more and more voices are speaking up, and demand, like Professor Morikawa, more transparency, more public participation in decision-making, and an end to "scientfic" whaling.

A good example is the opinion piece by Shohei Yonemoto, professor of global environment policy at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo, published last week-end by Asahi: "Useless research whaling should be abolished".

The world after Sushi

2010-01-27T13:37:00.015+01:00

I've just had my dinner, in Tokyo where I've been working for a few days.

I'm a bit exhausted tonight. So I will comment in detail only tomorrow on today's interesting article in "The Japan Times", shown on this photo, in which some possible or alledged impacts of the proposal to ban the international trade in Atlantic blue fin tuna are discussed.

If you like the photo illustrating this post, please be aware that I accept nominations for this year's Pulitzer Prize for photography. Ah, ah!

Important: If you're interested, I suggest you download as soon as possible the Japan Times' piece linked on this post, because this publication usually keeps its stories on-line only for a very short period of time.

Fiat

2010-01-19T22:38:00.009+01:00

It took me a good 24-48 hours last week to decide to which relief organization to send a donation to contribute to the effort in Haiti after the quake.

Of course I pay each year an annual fee to several humanitarian and development NGOs. But with the extra contribution I wanted to make for Haiti I must say that I was a bit overwhelmed by so many different calls for donation. In the last week, there has been Haiti fundraising appeals on virtually each and every page of some of the newspapers I read, let alone Internet fundraising. The design and logos are different (somewhat) on each fundraising drive (the bank account numbers too), but most of the time it's hard to distinguish one proposition from another. Actually, it probably does not matter too much, as long as one is sufficiently well informed to avoid the charlatans.

This initial dilemma reminded me of a couple of Power Point slides I'm using at the begining of one of the sessions of the Advocacy Training course I give to NGOs and foundations. Two slides: first I show photos of the campaigns (messaging) of two NGOs well known in the area of development/aid and two NGOs well known in the area of environment/ecology; and then I show photos of two cars, a Fiat and a Renault respectively. It's hard to spot the difference between a Fiat and a Renault, and it's almost equally hard to spot the difference between the NGOs in their respective fields.

I do that to emphasize that for a layperson not deeply involved or rooted in activism or policy, it's very difficult to make a difference (i.e. to choose) between two NGOs acting in the same sphere. Activists often tend to forget that (details of style and culture apart) the membership wants to contribute more or less to the same thing regardless of whether they've joined NGO Y or NGO X. Very much like with a Fiat and a Renault: with both you can go from A to B at more or less the same speed for more or less the same price (and more or less the same cost to the environment if they're maintained in similar conditions). The reason why one chooses a Fiat or a Renault has little to do with the main function of the cars; it's got more to do with details such as design, accessories, branding, accessibility and visibility of the local dealer, etc. And the reason why one chooses between NGO Y or NGO X is often not very different. This says a lot in favour of campaigns ran by NGO coalitions, buses and trains.

Finally I did send last week my Haiti donation to one of the reliable flagships of global humanitarian action. But to be fair, I won't tell you whether I chose Fiat or Renault.

The Biodiversity Test

2010-01-14T19:37:00.016+01:00

First post this year. Not that I've been on holidays for three weeks, no. On the contrary, the year's started sleeply, after the usual short end of year break.

Like millions of people, I went to see James Cameron's Avatar during the break. I had never seen a Cameron film (not even Titanic), but I highly recommend Avatar: a perfect fit to start this year, designated the Intenational Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations.

[I am a bit surprised that apparently so few commentators have seen in Avatar a parabol on what's happening now to our Planet and our indigenous peoples. Read Erik Assadourian's piece Avatar meets Crude on the Worldwatch Institute's blog, if you're not convinced.]

Coming back to the designation of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, the UN decided it because the governments of the world at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg in 2002 had pledged to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss by 2010. Sadly, that's another broken promise: biodiversity has continued and still continues to shrink. For this reason, I'm a bit surprised that the UN is putting so much emphasis on "celebrating". There's not much to celebrate, and a lot to be ashamed of, I would think.

There is a good chance that the creation of the proposed Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, also known in the policy jargon as "the IPCC of biodiversity") is agreed this year, and this is good.

But if we're all serious about conserving biodiversity (Life on Earth), a good outcome for this year could be the adoption of a Biodiversity Test that would be used to screen all sectorial and cross-sectorial activities liable to adversely affect biodiversity. Any proposal that would not meet the Biodiversity Test would be stopped, and their authors sent back to the drawing board.

If we're all serious...

Season's warning

2009-12-28T00:06:00.007+01:00

There is a sobber season's greetings message on the UNFCCC website.

Pretty good. And much better than the less than convincing attempts, two weeks ago, to paint the Copenhagen outcome as a meaningful step.

Boomerang

2009-12-23T22:38:00.003+01:00

As I anticipated yesterday, I joined today's demonstration in Madrid in front of the Danish Embassy for the release of the four Greenpeace activists who'd invited themselves at last week's royal gala dinner in Copenhagen.

There is a great YouTube video that shows why they did it, how they did it.

Strangely, I can't find on Greenpeace International's website any online petition demanding the release of their four comerades who are being punished arbitrarily (incomunicado in a jail over the festive season with no court hearing, until at least 7 January). But if you want to tell the Danes to stop being silly, you can sign the online petition Greenpeace-España has put up.

Why the Danish authorities have gone totally over the top remains a mystery. The only thing we know is that the boomerang effect is inevitably going to grow in the next couple of weeks.

Moral high ground

2009-12-22T20:48:00.010+01:00

It is remarkable that after last week's Climate Summit, more than ever before the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the civil society movement that emerged around the climate negotiations have the moral high ground.

In contrast, for anyone who believes in the importance and value of civil service and public authority, it is sad and a matter of deep concern that governments are acting irresponsibly and in violation of their own legal obligation under Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992). With Article 2, governments had contracted the obligation "to achieve [...] stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system", and to take action so that "such a level [...] be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner." This was written seventeen years ago in Rio...These governments increasingly smell like failed States.

The impunity enjoyed by the governments acting in violation of their own rules (until someone takes the obstructive large emitters to court?) also contrasts with the way Danish authorities and the UN have over-reacted to some of the outreach activities of NGOs and civil society organizations in Copenhagen.

It is a paradox that after behaving for several months in some ways as if they were an NGO, the UN suddenly restricted NGO access to the Summit considerably. But the most excessive example is perhaps the imprisonment of the four Greenpeace activists who displayed two banners in the hallway of the State Dinner offered by the Queen of Denmark in Copenhagen last week.

In the last 30 years Greenpeace has carried hundreds or thousands of stunts like this on numerous occasions (I've been involved in quite a number of them in my former Greenpeace life), and most of the time what you expect is a low profile from the authorities taken off guard , and even frequently off-the-record expressions of admiration to the activists ("Chapeau!") for having found another weak point in the security cordons. The Danish authorities' decision to keep the four Greenpeace activists in jail until at least 6 January, 2010 is not only excessive, it reflects the state of mind of a hopeless government.

A few hours before the Greenpeace activists (including the Director of Greenpeace-Spain) were arrested, the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (not exactly a climate leader even if his country is a leader in renewable energy) recognized with some humility at the beginning of his Summit speech that "the NGOs had been right" all those years, thereby implying that conventional politicians had been wrong not to pay attention.

I will join tomorrow a demonstration in Madrid in front of the Danish Embassy to tell the Danes to stop being silly. But I suppose that notwithstanding his nice words last week, the Spanish Prime Minister will not join us...

Humour

2009-12-18T17:01:00.007+01:00

I think the best thing I can do this week-end is to put a link to Richard Black's blogpiece of today which he's updating frequently through the day (and it may go on through the night or even tomorrow's early morning).

Richard's blogs always make good reading. I don't know if the subjacent humour in them is what people call English humour, but it's very good.

Global

2009-12-12T02:10:00.010+01:00

Impressive list of public mobilizations all over Planet Earth today, as Ministers have arrived in Copenhagen and Heads of State and Government are bound to be there mid next week.

I rescued this photo which I took last week when I visited the massive Tokyo Eco-Products Fair. I'm not sure what this puppet is advertising (I don't read Japanese), but I found it cool (somewhat) and appropriate (somewhat) when I saw it. Especially when people wonder (ask) whether the new Japanese Prime Minister is ready to be a climate leader, and the 43 countries member of the Association of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS) are calling for an extension of the Kyoto Protocol and the adoption of an additional protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to help the United States enter in the fray.

Copenhagen spill over

2009-12-08T22:09:00.013+01:00

An old friend and colleague with whom I worked for several years at meetings and assemblies of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sent me a note with a link to a statement made in Shangai by Wei Jiafu, the boss of the COSCO Group, the world's largest shipping conglomerate, proposing to "us[e] nuclear power onboard merchant ships as a further green initiative."

Wei Fu is reported as saying that "as [nuclear reactors] are already onboard submarines, why not cargo ships?". I don't like nuclear navies, but with all due respect for Mr. Jaifu, I'd say that the existence of little more than a couple of hundreds of currently operating nuclear submarines and a handful of nuclear aircraft carriers manned by tightly controlled (we hope) military personnel does not compare with hundreds or thousands of large container vessels flying flags of convenience, manned by under-qualified/under-paid crew members and rushing as fast as possible from Asia to deliver goods to the large global consumer markets.

At the very least, if this shipping industry nuclear ambition was to be considered (even remotely) as a possible option, the shipping industry would need to be brought under control by government agencies, the recent and still on-going trend of deregulation of the shipping sector would have to be reversed, the flags of convenience system (floating fiscal paradises) and the practice of using and trading with under-qualified and under-paid crew members should be banned. And of course ways to effectively prevent operational discharges of wastes at sea (a routine practice in the shipping industry for a long time) should be found.

The thought of the world economy becoming dependent on floating Chernobyls racing from one side of the planet to another is the opposite of what the tycoon of COSCO calls "a green initiative". The photo I've used to illustrate this post shows the nuclear icebreaker Lenin the USSR used in the Arctic. Of course with climate change there is no role for nuclear icebreakers to cross the Arctic anymore. But the story of the Lenin reminds us that one of the problems with radioactive spills (as opposed to oil spills) is that you don't see them at first sight: when one of its nuclear reactors suffered a meltdown in the Kara Sea in the 1960s, the crew of the Lenin had no choice but to dump it overboard in haste, and it took 25 years before the incident became known publically.

I expect that some readers will say "Oh well this CEO of COSCO is just a weirdo; why does Rémi pay attention to his statement?". Well, it may be because I find it scary that the largest shipping conglomerate is run by a weirdo. If I was a large shareholder of COSCO, I'd push this guy out and instruct the new one to invest my money in wind powered alternatives and other truly green genuine techniques instead.

Compromise

2009-12-07T00:38:00.005+01:00

Consensus means compromise. Compromise means give and take. But how far can we compromise with science when the future of our one and only planet is at stake? "Science is not negotiable" has already become a key Copenhagen slogan. But is consensus over a low common denominator preferable to a higher common denominator among only a select group? To answer this question properly, you need to watch the devil in the details, of course.

According to the “number crunchers” at the Climate Action Tracker, the proposals on the table add up to a 3.5º Celsius increase in global temperature and concentrations of 800 Parts per Million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Not good: the IPCC says that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change we need to reduce concentrations to 350 Parts per Million and prevent a global temperature increase of more than 2º Celsius.

Similarly, the C-Road simulator says the proposals add up to a 3.8º Celsius increase by 2100.

An authoritative report issued by the US Government (a "bipartisan report" in a way: it was commissioned by President Bush, written by scientists picked up by the Bush Administration and approved and released by the Obama Administration) says that 800 PPMs will bring annual climatic chaos to the US.

But despite all of this, I think it is important to try not to lose our sense of humor. So, pay a visit to the Climate Circus website which says more or less the same thing in a different way.

Inspiration before Copenhagen

2009-12-02T13:06:00.010+01:00

On the 50th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty, and on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, Greenpeace has produced a truly inspirational video featuring my Varda Group colleague Kelly Rigg who was the coordinator of the Greenpeace Antarctica Campaign in the 1980s and early 90s.

If a handful of people were able to protect the Antarctic continent at the time, the contemporary mass movement to protect the climate should manage to be heard, says (in a nutshell but with nicer words) Kelly in the video. When we first called for the Antarctic continent to become a World Park, reasonable people thought we were wasting their (and our) time. Until a moratorium on Antarctic minerals exploitation was adopted (the Madrid Protocol of 1991). What was deemed impossible and unrealistic only a few years earlier had become law.

In Copenhagen, Life is in balance. It shouldn't be so hard to make it again.

Click here to watch and share the video.

Visionaries

2009-12-01T14:01:00.005+01:00

Kelly sent us a few days ago this reproduction of an advert published in 1962 in Life Magazine. Since it's been circulating within the Tcktcktck world for a few days, I suppose I'm not the first one to blog it, but I can't resist.

"Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glaciers!"

Humble Oil & Refining Company merged with Standard Oil which later became Exxon.

"The petroleum energy Humble supplies - if converted into heat -- could melt [a giant glacier] at the rate of 80 tons each second".

Maybe in 1962 someone at Humble had read the IPCC assessment report in a crystal ball.

Green House

2009-11-25T21:42:00.009+01:00

I've painted The White House pale green because of course it's not quite become The Green House yet as (sobber as usual) Richard Black of the BBC points out.

The devil is in the details, and of course a lot of them need to be sorted out before and after Copenhagen. But if we look back in time and want to be optimistic, it's greening. Personally, I find today's White House announcement encouraging. A greening White House against Green House Gases, I like the metaphore.

Let's keep an eye on the State Department Copenhagen website they've just launched.

Whatever happens in Copenhagen, it will be a watershed. Copenhagen means the awareness of the globalization of vulnerability.

Of course the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other developing countries (like the Africans who made their voice heard at the recent Barcelona Climate Talks, as well as -- for example -- the Filipinos with half their bodies in the water) are the prime victims. But how can we avoid noting that in little more than half a century (since the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the word Third World in 1952) we moved from a world whose aspiration was to integrate that third part of the world to the other two (to either of the two dominating Cold War regimes) to exactly the opposite?

We have entered a world where we are all sharing the consequences of the planetary life system's vulnerability, enhanced (caused) by the damage we're doing to the climate and to biodiversity.

We're all on the same boat. Or life raft?

Talk shops

2009-11-23T20:31:00.013+01:00

It's climate talk season for everyone, everywhere.

I'll be speaking again in Madrid this week, this time at the request of the Spanish Foreign Affairs Ministry's Casa Asia, their Asia House.

Last week's dialogue at the Spanish Observatory of Sustainability was very stimulating, so I'm looking forward to this other one this week.

I'm also speaking this week in Barcelona at the ASEFUAN Dialogue also organized by Casa Asia.

The energy around major international meetings such as Copenhagen is startling, regardless of the actual outcome.

The meetings of Parties to Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) have become for environmentalists the equivalent of the Christians' Sunday mass (or maybe the Muslims' midday prayer). And the "summits" are the equivalent of the Christmas Midnight Mass or the Ramadan. The next one of those is Copenhagen.

Previously we've had, among others, the Earth Summit in Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and -- exactly 10 years ago -- the WTO Seattle Conference (I was there too).

Following with the analogy on religions, at these meetings and summits, you find all sorts of people. Sincere and inspired people, inspiring individuals who can move mountains...and also people who do not have much to do, but come out of curiosity or only to be seen.

Expect

2009-11-17T14:18:00.005+01:00

When he is not busy growing giant lemon fruits (photo), the former Director of the European Environment Agency, Domingo Jimenez Beltrán of Spain facilitates stimulating policy dialogues within his country.

He's asked me to participate next Thursday in a panel discussion about expectations viz the Copenhagen Climate Summit and the upcoming Spanish EU Presidency, in Madrid's Botanical Garden.

As the expectations for Copenhagen are evolving (shrinking?) by the day, I guess I'll have to prepare my speaking notes at the last minute.

Face up

2009-11-12T18:48:00.013+01:00

I've just spent four days in Bogota, Colombia where Transparency International asked me to give a two-day Advocacy Training course for their Latin American chapters.

By pure coincidence the course took place this week when Transparencia por Colombia launched their campaign Ponga la Cara. [I suppose it would best translate as Face up].

Face up for your votes.

Until recently, the individual votes of parlamentarians and municipal council members in Colombia were not recorded. I suppose they'd say that this lack of transparency was necessary to protect them. But for Transparencia por Colombia this goes against the right-to-know and it can enhance corruption. A new law was recently enacted whereby individual votes must now be recorded and publicized. But so far it's been hardly implemented, hence Transparencia por Colombia's Face Up campaign calling for effective implementation.

The two-day training course in a hotel in downtown Bogota was pretty dense. So it was good to get out on Tuesday morning and join Transparencia por Colombia's Director Elisabeth Ungar and her team (photo) who were inviting in front of the Colombian Congress building the parliamentarians to "put their faces up". We stayed for about 90 minutes, but by the time we had to leave none had paused to face up.

Wind the clock

2009-11-07T08:36:00.006+01:00

Conversations in the last two days at the Barcelona Climate Talks were all about the best way to rewind the Copenhagen clock.

The clock hasn't stopped ticking but it's losing a few seconds every minute or every hour. It's been the case for quite some time of course, but the fact that after Barcelona everyone knows this raises a tactical issue: Will civil society remain politically relevant in the coming weeks with a slogan "fair, ambitious, binding treaty now" which everyone knows can't be achieved in that time frame unless something extraordinary happens?

Repetition, repetition, repetition is okay for campaigning purposes. Yes, but as long as this approach does not prevent adaptation to evolving realities.

Maybe it is time to adapt the public communication to make sure the complex formula currently under consideration to secure that the Copenhagen legacy is at least a big step in the right direction can be understood by the general public even if there is no new treaty this year.

There is a nice user-friendly table on the BBC website, describing the main regional groups' positions.

Yes we can

2009-11-04T19:35:00.006+01:00

As people are pretty pessimistic here as the third day of the Barcelona Climate Talks is ending, I thought I'd cheer up with an encouraging piece of news.

The Spanish newspaper El País reports a new milestone in clean energy production: last night, 40% of Spain's electricity was produced by wind.

One year after President Obama's election, this is an opportunity to pull out the old slogan again: Yes we can.

Hate

2009-11-03T23:01:00.005+01:00

Interesting remark by Yukio Hatoyama, the new Japanese Prime Minister.

He's reported as saying "I hate whale meat." [I trust it is not a typographic error and that he did not mean to say he just "ate" whale meat].

It's not really surprising to hear this from a Japanese citizen of his generation. I hear this all the time in Tokyo, because whale meat is associated in the psyche of the Prime Minister's generation to the post WW-II hard times when Japanese people had little else to eat than boiled whale meat in the way of protein.

What's interesting, and perhaps a sign of new times, is that for the first time a Prime Minister says loud what the majority of Japanese citizens believe. Of course I'm not naive, and I know Mr. Yukio Hatoyama did not say "I love whales". But I'm sure that's how it red for the bureaucrats of the Japanese Fisheries Agency.

Talking of bureaucrats, Mr. Yukio Hatoyama was elected two months ago because he'd pledged to put an end to the uncontrolled power of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, and to stop excessive and unjustified public spendings and government subsidies.

The Japanese Fisheries Agency has been spending millions every year to artificially maintain a whaling tradition under the guise of expensive subsidized scientific research.

Until now, no Japanese Prime Minister had shown any interest in scrutinizing this non-sense, because they acted as if they liked whale meat.

With his confession this week, is Mr. Hatoyama opening a new page?