Day 1: Curtain Raiser

By: James Fahn on December 3rd, 2007

The 1st day has arrived, and we’ve finally got a chance to meet all the fellows after poring over their CVs for the last couple of months. As you can see from their bio’s, they’re an impressive bunch and they’ve come from all over the world to join us in covering the Climate Change Summit in Bali.

Logistically, things have gone remarkably smoothly. All our fellows and support staff have arrived in one piece, and we are nicely set up at a hotel about half an hour from the Convention Center. In the morning, we shuttled back and forth to the Bali International Convention Center (BICC) to get accredited and check out the media facilities.

In the afternoon, we had an Orientation for our own Climate Change Media Partnership. All the fellows introduced themselves and commented briefly on how climate change is covered in their own countries. We went over the logistics and the agenda, which is chock full of activities – including panel discussions, a field trip, a media clinic, a radio pool, online reports, an MTV report and a virtual press conference on Second Life.

In the evening, we all traipsed back to the BICC for the first press briefing by UNFCCC chief Yvo de Boer, who outlined his expectations for the summit: launch negotiations on a post-2012 climate deal; define an agenda for these negotiations that will likely include discussions on mitigation, adaptation, technology and financing; and set a deadline for the conclusion of a deal – most likely 2009 at the COP15 in Copenhagen.

When it came to ask questions, the UN spokesman John Hay first pointed to the usual suspects, correspondents from the wire agencies whom he knew on a first-name basis. They asked questions on issues such as the “toolkits” – the mechanisms, such as trading and sequestration, that will be negotiated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and how they will be financed. But then our fellows started raising their hands, and their questions were quite different.

Tran Thi Thuy Binh asked how a country like Vietnam would benefit from hosting Clean Development Projects (de Boer answered that it would receive technology transfer and valuable financing and expertise in building a sustainable economy). Binh is working on a story as to why Vietnam has allegedly proposed 30 CDM projects, but only one has been accepted.

Sun Yu from China asked how the Annex 1 parties have performed in meeting the emission reduction targets (de Boer’s answer: “mixed”)

Anup Khastagir from Bangladesh asked what the role of the USA will be in the current negotiations (answer: “vital”).

Aijun Hou from China queried about the status of implementation with the Kyoto Protocol, and Salome Alweny from Uganda wondered why CDM projects are so inequitably distributed (they’re part of a commercial process, remarked de Boer, and so their distribution tends to follow the market).

I spoke to John Hay afterward, and he was pleased to have the questions from a more diverse array of journalists, although he also noted that many of the questions were “more entry-level” than those from the wire agency reporters, who have been attending summits for years. This is perhaps to be expected, given that many (not all) developing country journalists – not to mention their audiences – are newly engaged in the issue. It points out how essential it is to do more training on climate change for the media in the Global South.

It also revealed the different priorities that journalists from the North and South have. While the wire agency reporters were asking about toolkits and financing, the fellows were inquiring about the potential weaknesses of the Clean Development Mechanism and how well developed countries have done in meeting their commitments.

Mostly, however, for those of us who have been working to set up the Climate Change Media Partnership, it was extremely gratifying to see that the fellows we’ve worked so hard to bring to Bali were not afraid to ask the questions that mattered to them despite the imposing atmosphere. It seemed to confirm our initial impressions that we’ve selected the right journalists to be here.