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...

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...

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...

A Message Home to the US: What Actually Happened at COP21

  by Morgan Heckerd Over the past two weeks 196 governments have spent hours within consultation rooms and plenary halls in efforts of reaching an agreement. They are here in Paris because they know that the era of emissions need to come to an end. The urgency of climate change is no longer a concept that they can deny. But– the developed countries have fallen short in adopting the...

Words, words, words: The Failure of the Paris Agreement

In reaction to the text that was released this afternoon, later passed tonight, the spirits today are all different. My heart is heavy and confused: torn between being part of a strong movement that is demanding climate justice while watching a plenary unfold that is delivering an unambitious and immoral deal made of false promises. The Paris agreement did not start here, or last year. Although...