The WHAT after Paris?

By Aura Silva Martinez There were over 160 people sitting in layers around a big, wide circle at the Climate Coalition 21 assembly. An ongoing wave of comments, questions and answers was being thrown to a multitude of unresponsive chairs. This was an overwhelming experience for me, and despite being a somewhat inefficient space where having a real, meaningful conversation was significantly...

Civil Society Rise On D12

By Kimberly Lopez Castellanos “Do not pour water over your eyes while your head is leaned back.” “Clench your fist to make room between your wrist and the handcuff.” Somehow, I found myself in the basement of an alternative space training for civil disobedience. Even the date, D12, sounds like Dooms Day. Why would I even think about being a part of it? For months, the French 'Coalition...

Oil, Gas and Coal, Back Up, Back Up!

by Makiko Yoshida What the Paris Agreement has Failed to Achieve After four years of negotiations, the Paris Agreement was adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on December 12th. There are many reasons why many of us do not think that this agreement is sufficient to what the world needs despite what many media outlets have been reporting. Following the...

The Power of Media and COP21: A Reflection

By Jenna Farineau “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty look innocent, and that’s the power. Because they control the minds of the masses” - Malcom X Because they control the minds of the masses. The existence of COP21 stands tall upon the shoulders of the negotiators, Heads of States, the French government -...

Lost and damaged: International politics playing with our lives.

By Kendall Cook I found myself walking through the bourgeois neighborhood Saint-Germain, an ornate path to a prestigious institution where I was meeting an elite group of Loss and Damage experts.  There were about twenty to twenty five people in the room, all professionals over the age of thirty, half of which were sustainable development directors of various NGOs, the other, self-involved...