“This kind of flooding has not happened in this region since 1929”, says Saleem Ullah from the UNDP Pakistan office who hails from Charsadda, one of the worst affected districts in the current flooding. The UN says the disaster has left up to four million people homeless in Pakistan. Around 14 million have been affected and over 1,600 people are feared dead. This area was already reeling from the effects of the recent militancy in Swat, when thousands of people fled here from the battles between the Taliban and the Pakistan army. The internally displaced persons or IDPs had only just returned to their homes in Swat once the Taliban had been chased out, when this new disaster struck. “The people no longer appear to have the capacity to handle this disaster”, says Saleem Ullah. “Their resilience has been eroded”.

There is more bad news in the offing. The Met Office has predicted heavy rains in the coming weeks and says the monsoon system currently prevailing over the country might last until the first week of September. Rains in Gilgit-Baltistan in the mountainous north of the country have also swept away hundreds of homes and bridges. The Indus River weaves down from Gilgit-Baltistan into Khyber Pukhtunkwa province (formerly known as the North West Frontier Province) before heading south into the Punjab. The River Swat feeds into the River Kabul which in turn meets the Indus in a place called Attock on the border with the Punjab. Massive amounts of flood water have by now caused havoc in southern Punjab and have entered the southern province of Sindh. Widespread flooding is now occurring alongside the Indus as it flattens out before meeting the Arabian Sea.

Although it is impossible to say categorically that the current flooding is a result of climate change, experts are saying that we can expect to see more extreme and intense weather events in the near future.

“This was not a unique event. It can happen again given the timing and availability of moisture. What happened is that a cooler, westerly system over the north of the country interacted with hot, moisture-laden winds from the east and caused a series of cloud bursts”, explains Dr Qamrul Zaman Chaudhry, head of the Met Office in Islamabad. “Extreme weather events are on the rise and their intensity is also increasing. In the last six months alone Pakistan has been hit by a severe cyclone and now these massive floods”.

A Task Force on Climate Change was set up by the Government in 2009 to advise on the impacts of climate change in the country. The Task Force finalized its report and handed it over to the Government in February. In the section entitled “Past and expected future climate changes over Pakistan” the report says: “It is projected that climate change will increase the variability of the monsoon rains and enhance the frequency and severity of extreme events such as floods and droughts”. Recommendations called for the “sufficient expansion of large reservoir capacity… and development of capacity to deal with disasters like floods”. There was also a call to expand the “meteorological monitoring stations in various parts of the country, in particular the northern mountainous areas”.

The report was quietly filed away and to date, Pakistan has no national climate change strategy. Neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal have all come up with climate change action plans that are now being implemented. According to Shafqat Kakakhel, a former UNEP official who served on the Task Force, “We can see how the monsoon is becoming more chaotic, erratic and unpredictable. Last year, it came late and there was less rainfall. So either it is coming too late or too soon or there is too much rain. What the country really needs are standard operating procedures for disaster risk reduction. In Bangladesh they have FM radios advising people about flooding and people know exactly where to run to for safety. We need to have plans right down to the district level”.

President Asif Ali Zardari’s government is receiving harsh criticism for its slow response to the disaster and his decision to travel abroad to Britain as the floods began. The floods have also raised concerns for the country’s internal security. Hundreds of roads and bridges have been destroyed, countless villages and farms have been inundated, crops destroyed and livestock lost. “I foresee terrible food shortages and disease breaking out”, says Jugnu Mohsin, the editor of The Friday Times, Pakistan’s influential English language weekly. “There has been a complete state failure – the state can’t come to the rescue of the people. Aside from that, I am infuriated by the irresponsible use of resources and the neglect of the environment by the industrialized world whose actions have caused climate change. We are suffering today because of their carelessness and callousness – and it looks like they are still not willing to do anything about it (cutting carbon emissions)”.

The disaster has also been made worse by the rapid growth in Pakistan’s population and the scramble for land for housing in towns and villages. People increased their risk by building homes in dry river beds or too close to the rivers. “There has been a lot of bad planning and management” explains Ali Sheikh of LEAD-Pakistan, an NGO based in Islamabad. “Our population has just grown too fast. Adaptation is the key. We need better urban planning, we need to protect our infrastructure and we need to install early warning systems which are community-based. We also need to preserve our natural ecosystems where we can”.

Without trees and thick vegetation to slow down the water flow, the flooding took on greater intensity. “If you don’t stop the water it will go at a greater speed”, points out Shafqat Kakakhel. “Deforestation is a big problem in Pakistan”. Extensive deforestation in the country’s conifer forests started on a large scale in the 1990s when roads were built into remote mountain areas. Today, there is a clear nexus between the notorious timber mafia which operates in the north of the country and the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban grabbed power (as they did in Swat and Waziristan), protected forests were cut down and exploited with no regards to the consequences. During the massive earthquake that struck Pakistan’s north in 2005, most of the damage was done by landslides caused by deforestation. Although a ban on logging is now in place, trees continue to be cut and sold to contractors who work for the timber mafia. This mafia gets rich while the forest communities remain impoverished.

However, Saleem Ullah from the UNDP, who is also a trained forester from the Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar, says that heavy forest cover would not have prevented the current flooding. “Perhaps it would have reduced it by 20% or so, but there was just too much rain. One or two heavy cloudbursts are enough to cause a local flash flood – this time there were as many as a dozen cloudbursts in a row”. It was a unique phenomenon but one that can happen again given the increasing unpredictability and extreme variability of the climate. For the people of Charsadda, the nightmare continues – there are three more weeks to go before the rains subside. “I don’t know how much more they can take”, says Saleem Ullah. “They can only pray for God’s mercy”.

Editor’s note: Rina Saeed Khan, a Pakistani CCMP fellow, wrote this report on the floods in the early days of the crisis.

Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer

As the Bonn climate change talks wrapped up on 11 June, the hallways remained subdued. Negotiators and NGO activists spoke about the “re-building of trust” after the bitterness of Copenhagen and the “lowering of expectations” that had followed. No wonder then that outgoing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told our group of developing country journalists gathered by the CCMP that the process of setting adequate targets for greenhouse gas reductions would take much longer than anticipated, echoing his earlier estimate that “it will not happen in the next decade. But it will happen… ”

De Boer, who stepped down officially at a special plenary session held during the Bonn talks, reiterated in his farewell speech: “We know that the current pledges from industrialized countries are not sufficient to bring us into the 25-40% range [of emissions cuts] that the IPCC projects in its most ambitious scenario, but we are on a longer journey”.

Those who have worked with him in the UN secretariat told us over dinner that Yvo is in fact very upset about the way things turned out in Copenhagen. From 2006 to 2010 he had worked tirelessly to bring North and South together, aiming to “seal a deal” in Copenhagen as mandated by the Bali Action Plan. In the process, he earned the ire of both sides and became the de facto spokesman for the process (although his real job is to run the secretariat!). He famously burst into tears in Bali after spending two exhausting weeks watching countries squabble over carbon emissions.

In Copenhagen, I watched him wearily walk to the back entrance of the Bella Center, standing alone in the cold while he waited for his car, just before President Obama announced the last minute “Copenhagen Accord” to salvage some sort of agreement. De Boer thanked the doorman and drove off, only to return the next day to give a press conference in which he tried to put a positive spin on what has been subsequently described as the “collective failure of world leaders to rise to the occasion”. He referred to it in his farewell speech, saying: “To use World Cup imagery: we got a yellow card in Copenhagen and the referee’s hand will edge towards the red one if we fail to deliver in Cancun and beyond”.

By now a consummate diplomat, de Boer did not let his frustration show at the farewell speech in Bonn as he thanked the secretariat staff and the delegates who gave him a standing ovation. His successor, Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica, gave him a pair of sturdy shoes as a farewell gift, eliciting laughs as she explained how difficult it would be for her to fill his much larger ones. On 8 July  she will take the helm of the UNFCCC and will begin one of the trickiest jobs in the world – she has already described it as “thankless”.

When she later met our group she talked about “the miracle of negotiations” and the need for “gradual incremental efforts”. We found out afterwards that she had earlier told a group of journalists from the developed world that she is unlikely to see an all-encompassing deal. “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime”, Figueres had told them. She was clearly advised not to repeat those words to our group!

“What a pity she did not say this to us”, said one of the CCMP journalists. True, it would have made our reporting more honest and accurate at least, but one can understand why she was told not to repeat it – the developing world, especially the front line states who are already suffering, would like to see climate action taken as soon as possible and most certainly in their own lifetimes!

According to analyst Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development, “due to the global recession and the bad press received by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the general mood of the public (towards climate change) is already quite negative”. He thinks it may take until perhaps the IPCC’s fifth assessment report comes out in 2014 to recover the momentum needed to take us forward.

Farrukh Iqbal Khan, chair of the Adaptation Fund, with Yvo de Boer

Farrukh Iqbal Khan is the lead negotiator for Pakistan at the UN climate change negotiations and the current head of the Adaptation Fund set up by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn. This is the first time that the UNFCCC will be able to disburse funds directly to developing countries to deal with the impacts of climate change. Farrukh is the third (and youngest) chair of the 32-member Fund’s board, established in 2008. Members come from both developing and developed countries. The board held its tenth meeting in Bonn on June 15 and 16.  CCMP’s Rina Saeed Khan spoke to him:

Rina: Has the fund given any money as yet for adaptation?

Farrukh: We are currently looking at eight adaptation projects submitted by developing countries – Senegal, Solomon Islands, Turkmenistan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Egypt, Mauritania and Pakistan. The project from Pakistan, for example, is on reducing risk and vulnerabilities from Glacier Lake Outburst Floods in the Northern Areas by building the human and technical capacities of local communities. We have not given any money as yet as the projects are still under discussion and technical review.

Where is the money for adaptation coming from?

We received 45 m euros from Spain, and Germany gave us 10 m. Sweden has also announced another 10 m that it will give to us. We have roughly 400 m euros of our own money, the amount projected from the proceeds of the Clean Development Mechanism levy (2% on each CDM project). I have pushed for full operationalization of the Fund and we will start financing projects soon. We have accredited three agencies with the fund; two are multi-lateral entities, the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, and one is what is called by the UN a national implementing entity, the Centre de Suivi Ecologique from Senegal.

Why is it taking so long for the Fund to start operating?

It takes time to build institutions. In the next few months the board will approve the projects. It took us two years to build everything from scratch. We have evolved a direct access modality whereby countries can access the Fund’s resources directly and without having to go through the multi-lateral entities. This has never happened before and this is the innovative feature that this board has evolved.

How will this fund be different from the Green Climate Fund?

While the name is yet to be agreed, the so-called Green Climate Fund will be a major fund. An agreement on financial architecture is the key to unlocking a pathway for a climate change regime in the post-2012 scenario. We are still in the process of defining its governance structure. In addition, we have not made any determination as what would be the sources of funding. However, it is expected that this new fund will be under the authority of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties and that it should be several times bigger than the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

Are you expecting more money to come in from fast-start financing?

I do expect more countries to contribute. We are best placed to channel resources towards adaptation, including through the fast start financing. As chairperson of the Adaptation Fund Board, I have written to all Annex I countries [required under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions] to ask them to consider channelling their adaptation contribution through the Adaptation Fund. Indications are positive, and one is expecting that developed countries are seriously considering channelling financial resources through this fund.

The delegates in Bonn have talked ceaselessly about the importance of recovering the trust in the negotiating process which was so badly damaged at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen last December.  Some say what this really means is that there has been no progress on  the fundamental issues at stake. “During this meeting we have just been agreeing on the terms, not setting out our different positions”, said Andrea Albán, one of the Colombian delegates. There is optimism, the delegates say. But on first sight it looks as though world leaders aren’t in a hurry to seal a deal.

It looks like the  bureaucrats and journalists will keep filling the pockets of airlines and hotels for a long time to come. This would be fine if the meeting was to decide the budget of the next World Cup, or the winner of an arts competition. But the issue that keeps bringing hundreds of delegates together is the planet’s path to destruction, with millions of people hungry, thirsty and facing thunderstorms and hurricanes in houses made of sticks.

Even so, business still looks to many to be more important than an unbalanced planet, where the poor get poorer every day while others refuse to change their lifestyles and excessive energy use. There hasn’t been any agreement here on technology transfer, or on how much money there will be for climate for adaptation and mitigation, or on who will manage it. The deadlock could last a long time, as de Boer thinks.

His estimate of how long the negotiations could last is worrying for a country like Colombia. It could mean the thawing of the high altitude glaciers and the continuing reduction of the moorlands, those places in the high mountains where the water that supplies most of the country’s population starts its journey.

Glacial melt will also mean sea level rise. Researchers in Colombia say a sea level rise of one metre – which scientists believe could happen by 2100 – would inundate 5,100 kms of the coast, affecting 1,500,000 people. So far the emissions reduction targets announced by 37 developed countries and 38 developing ones will achieve an estimated 13% reduction in global emissions, if they happen. But scientists have recommended a reduction of 25-40% to stop global average temperatures rising beyond 2C above their pre-industrial level.  Some scientists say the world should seek to limit the rise to 1.5C, while others maintain that it is on course to reach 4C, unless there are radical changes.

Cristiana Figueres, de Boer’s successor as UNFCCC executive secretary, says the negotiators know the actual targets aren’t enough.  Andrea García, another member of the Colombian delegation, thinks de Boer’s statement about there being more than a decade of negotiations ahead simply confuses the delegates. She welcomes the arrival of Figueres, who she considers more progressive than her predecessor. But Figueres herself doesn’t talk about a 10-year perspective. She told journalists she thinks it will take 20 or 30 years…

During the ongoing UN climate change conference in the German city of Bonn, just as Nepalese officials announced an initiative to form a group, the Mountain Alliance Initiative, two Central Asian nations and one from the Caucasus outsmarted them by notifying the UN that they were establishing a similar group.

Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan got together and wrote to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) saying they had agreed to establish the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries.

Landlocked Nepal’s officials say the group it has announced will be effective in getting mountainous countries heard in international forums like UN climate conference.

“This alliance has been initiated so that mountainous countries can raise their climate-related concerns and influence the UNFCCC’s decision-making process to our advantage,” said Nepal’s environment ministry secretary Ganesh Joshi.

The three rival countries have stated almost the same reason for their move.

In their letter to the UNFCCC, they wrote: “We have agreed to establish the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries for protecting and lobbying for the interests of this group of countries in the framework of the UNFCCC’s negotiation process.”

While Nepalese officials have prepared a calendar to hold workshops and meetings between mountainous countries before requesting the UNFCCC to officially recognise the MAI, the other three have already done that.

“We request to the secretariat to take note of the new group and include it in all its listings,” the letter from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan read.

The UNFCCC has officially listed its member countries under several groups, including small island states, developing countries and least developed countries.

Nepalese officials think adequate attention has not been paid to the issues of mountainous countries in international climate negotiations.

“Our mountain ecology stands so vulnerable to climate change and we believe Nepal can ideally lead to bring that point to the fore,” said Madhab Karki, Deputy Director of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which is helping Nepal in its bid.

Although judged susceptible to the impacts of climate change, the Himalayan region has seen very little scientific research.

The most talked-about impact has been the retreat of Himalayan glaciers due to temperature increases caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

That has triggered fears of lakes and rivers swelling to dangerous levels in the near term and running dry in the long run, spelling disaster for millions of people in the region who rely on the river systems.

Increasing floods, droughts and landslides, the northward movement of some plant and animal species, a drop in water availability and agricultural production have been some of the observed results many link to climate change, although these are yet to be established scientifically.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has called the Himalayas a white spot, meaning there is a big information gap in this region.

And there are concerns that nothing much is being done to find out what has been happening to the mountain ecology as climate changes.

That was why, Nepalese officials say, the country’s Prime Minister, Madhab Kumar Nepal, addressing the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December, had proposed forming a common platform of mountain countries.

But while the Nepalese administration took time to move on with the idea, officials from Kyrgyzstan were already taking the lead.

“We had last year even before the Copenhagen conference floated the idea of bringing the mountainous countries together,” says Ysmail Dairov, who heads the Regional Mountain Centre of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek..

But he said several countries, particularly from South Asia, had not responded to the idea.

“At first they said this was something that would have to be done at the foreign ministry level. And even when we managed to send a letter from the Kyrgyz foreign ministry to the foreign ministries of these countries, there was no response.”

Nepalese officials say even they were approached by the Kyrgyz officials to join the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries.

“We don’t need to do that as we have support from many mountainous countries, including those in Latin America,” said Nepal’s environment secretary Joshi.

“Moreover, we are not just bringing together landlocked mountainous countries; our support base is quite a bit wider.”

That remains to be seen. But for now, the competition between Nepal and its rivals has left some mountainous countries bewildered.

“We don’t know what we do now,” says Abas Basir, Deputy Director of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency.

“But what we do know is that if they remain divided like this, the whole effort of amplifying the voice of mountainous countries will collapse.”

As a rural woman, she says, the biggest challenge she faces is food insecurity caused by changing  climatic conditions. Gazing over her dry and dusty fields, she adds: “If there was good weather, timely rain, and availability of water, energy and food security, our work as women would be much easier.”

Maluleke, a 66-year-old KwaZulu Natal small farmer, has seen many changes for the worse in weather and climatic conditions  on her land in Ntshongweni, north of Durban. “Over the years I have seen floods and drought ravaging my village, which was once considered the provincial maize basket,” she says.

In good years her maize would be shoulder-high by the end of the growing season. Even in bad years, her crop would rustle around her waist. But this year only a few plants have survived to grow knee-high, withering in the heat. Maize production on her land has dropped from five tons per hectare to three. Experts now believe dry-land maize production could fail entirely in much of southern Africa by mid-century, forcing a switch to alternative crops.

“We have experienced droughts recently but this is the worst I can remember,” she said. “The sun is so hot, and there is little hope now that we are going to survive.” The negative effects of climate change are likely to hit the poorest people in the poorest countries hardest.

Maluleke is the primary care-giver for her family in times of disaster and environmental stress.
“The existing shortfalls in water have been exacerbated and now, the time I take to fetch water or wood has certainly increased my workload, limiting my opportunities to branch out into other, non-traditional activities,” she said.

People hereabouts used to farm in keeping with a familiar seasonal pattern. The farmers would  clear their land in October and November so they could spend December and January planting and working their fields. “But things have changed. When we think we should be planting, harvesting or resting, in fact it’s the opposite, because of the climate,” Maluleke explained.

Rural women form a disproportionate share of the rural poor. The developing world is likely to feel the consequences of climate change particularly in terms of water availability and from a compounding of the effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, says Maira Zahur of Gender and Climate Change (Women for Climate Justice). It is a global network of women, activists and experts. Zahur, a researcher, adds: “Women are more vulnerable to climate change because they are more likely to be poor and have fewer coping mechanisms than men, and have additional responsibilities.”

Themba Linden, political adviser to Greenpeace in South Africa, said the effects of climate change worsened existing problems like food security, water scarcity and HIV/AIDS.

A UN Development Programme report says women in sub-Saharan Africa spend about 40 billion hours a year collecting water and doing their household chores. This means that increased water scarcity would particularly affect women, girls and to some extent boys, because they would have to travel further to collect water, or would have to use a less safe water source closer to home, Linden said.

“Seventy per cent of human beings worldwide living below the poverty line are women. In particular, in developing countries and communities that are highly dependent on local natural resources, women are likely to be disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change,” says Ulrike Röhr. Röhr is director of Genanet, a Berlin-based group working on gender, justice and sustainability.

She said climate change often affects the areas that are the basis of livelihoods for which women are responsible, for example nutrition and water and energy supplies. “And because of gender differences in property rights, access to information and in cultural, social and economic roles, the effects of climate change are likely to affect men and women differently,” she said.

Those effects are not limited to immediate impacts and changing behaviour but also lead to subsequent changes in gender relations. Spending more time on traditional women’s tasks such as collecting water and fuelwood and feeding the family reinforces traditional work roles and works against a change in which women might begin to play other roles.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women farmers in Africa produce up to 80% of the continent’s food. “To be successful, adaptation policies and measures within both developed and developing countries need to be gender sensitive,” Röhr said.

So far, climate change negotiations have responded poorly to the impacts on women, she said.
“And while global policies advocate a gender perspective, and including women in environment and development efforts, few governments have incorporated such policies into their national plans.”

“Extreme events and environmental degradation become a women’s issue because we are responsible for providing for the whole community,” said Anna Pinto, programme director with the Centre for Organisation, Research and Education (CORE), an NGO based in north-eastern India. She was speaking at a  side event during the UNFCCC Bonn climate talks in early June.

“Some one billion people have little access to clean water, another 2.5 bn don’t have access to sanitation. Climate change will make this situation worse,” said outgoing UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer this week in Bonn, where climate negotiations have been continuing.

For Africa alone these figures are 350 million and 500 million respectively said Bai-Mas Taal, Gambia’s former Minister of Water Affairs, now executive secretary of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW).

Climate change will affect weather patterns, rainfall cycles, river flow and soil moisture content, which in turn determine floods, droughts and agricultural yields, argues the Global Water Partnership (GWP), an umbrella for 2,176 water organisations in 153 countries.

“There is an international convention regulating water resource management, but there’s no single UN body dealing specifically with water issues, and water is marginalised in the climate negotiations,” says GWP executive secretary Dr. Ania Grobicki. “Water evaporated from the negotiating texts in Copenhagen” (where the last UN climate summit took place in December 2009).

“We are calling for a programme on water, climate and development to be established under the UNFCCC’s work on adaptation,” Grobicki announced at an 8 June press conference.
The aims of the programme would be to incorporate Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) thinking and practice into efforts to combat climate change.

Such a programme would also open up the water sector for adaptation funding, something that is badly needed, says the GWP. “In the past couple of decades investment in water infrastructure and water information systems has declined,” said Grobicki. But the current US  $30 billion fast track funding on the table is not enough. “To achieve water security in Africa alone more than $16 billion is needed and that calculation is based on spending only $50 per person that currently doesn’t have access to clean water,” stressed Taal.

Adaptation measures would include building a large network of storage dams throughout Africa, Grobicki told CCMP. “Most agriculture is rain-fed. As climate variability increases and temperatures rise. water security drops radically, but dams ensure water is available throughout the year.”

“Water-saving technologies can assist farmers to use their scarce water resources efficiently,” said Grobicki . “Drip irrigation offers huge potential for saving water in rural areas, while remote sensing can be used to inform farmers about the moisture content of the soil so they know how much water they need to use to grow their crops.”

Confirmation that Cameroon will not qualify for help came from the US. “Fast start financial agreements were announced with the intent of getting an agreement in Copenhagen. Countries that reject the overall effort – that say ‘no, I have no interest in your agreement, I want something different’ – I am not quite sure they should be part of this financing,” said the head of the US delegation at the latest round of negotiations here in Bonn, Dr Jonathan Pershing.

Developing countries  were offered $30 bn over the next three years at the Copenhagen summit  to let them start work immediately on climate adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer, capacity building and forest conservation.  Most of the money is still to be made available by donors. In the long term, the stated intention is to provide $100 bn annually from 2020.

Asked why Cameroon had not signed the Accord, the head of its delegation, Mr Joe Armathe, said: “I cannot answer that question.” He explained that after the Copenhagen summit the delegation made a proposal to the Prime Minister and President of Cameroon. The proposal, he said, outlined specific activities to be undertaken in the area of climate adaptation and mitigation  in the country.

So it is for the Prime Minister and possibly the Presidency to decide whether Cameroon signs the Accord or not. According to Mr Armathe, signing it, however imperfect it may be, would constitute a first step towards a legally-binding agreement on tackling climate change.

Other African states have also not signed the Accord, in some cases apparently because of fundamental differences of principle with its key architects, including the US, UK and the European Union. In the case of Cameroon, Mr Armathe speculated that its failure to sign could be simply the result of bureaucracy.

He acknowledged that Cameroon will miss out on the current funding offer. If this happens, it would mean that Cameroon may not have the money needed to continue work in many climate change adaptation and mitigation activities. Recognizing the urgency of securing eligibility for the funding, Mr Armathe said he would initiate a letter to the Prime Minister through the Ministry of Environment and Nature Protection to inform him of the disadvantages of not signing the Accord.

Even though Cameroon is excluded from benefitting from the fast start financing now, it could still do so if it signs the Accord in future. Among the 191 countries that make up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 127 have signed. Zimbabwe, Sudan, Niger, Liberia, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, Sao Tome & Principe and Equatorial Guinea are among the few African countries that have not signed the Accord.

Because of visa delays, only seven journalists from India who are climate change specialists managed to make it to Pakistan. The remaining 23 journalists who have an interest in and experience of environmental reporting came from all over Pakistan. There was a mix of print and electronic journalists from big media houses, and members of the Urdu language press were also invited.

It was a remarkable and very impressive achievement. One participant said the best part for her was meeting journalists from across the frontier. One of Rina’s coups was to enlist the Federal Minister of the Environment of Pakistan, Mr Hameed Ullah Jan Afridi, to inaugurate the workshop. His speech included this passage:

“ …some prophets of doom may foresee a future filled with conflicts as every country seeks to satisfy its water needs from increasingly limited water resources, but history bears witness to the fact that cooperation, not conflict, is the most logical response to trans-boundary water management issues. The need of the hour is to think in global terms; whether upstream or downstream, we are all in the same boat. I am hopeful that this all-important consultative workshop on “Sharing our Resources: A Vision for Addressing Cross-Border Water Scarcity Caused by Climate Change” will help boost our efforts to think and act together.”

That sounds like a Ministerial statement that can be used in a variety of contexts to suggest that dialogue and co-operation are rational choices even after 60 years of mistrust. And perhaps it may seem persuasive to potential donors of future workshops.

Many of the journalists were keen to know more about what CCMP has done so far, and to know whether they might either be able to be part of it or else to attract funding from somewhere to allow them to attend future COPs as a group. CCMP deserves credit for showing what reporting by those most involved can achieve, and Rina and Joydeep’s vision and leap of faith produced a very worthwhile result (there is already an Islamabad Google group similar to CCMP’s).

Supporters of the Workshop included LEAD Pakistan, DfID, the Commonwealth Foundation, UN Pakistan and the Pakistani Environment Ministry.

What would it take for you to leave your comfortable car at home and jump on a bicycle to get to work, school, or even to go shopping? As cities focus more and more on clean energy, residents of Copenhagen – a developed city – have adopted cycling as the preferred mode of transport. Rosalia Omungo reports on the Copenhagen cycling experience.