Social PreCOP: the youth take the floor and the mesas begin

by nathan thanki Work at the social preCOP in Venezuela has finally begun on the process to prepare a declarative document reflecting the demands of social movements in relation to climate change and the international process. Following a day of presentations from local governments—including the Mayor of Nantes and the Governor of Caracas—day two, called “Youth Take the Floor” began with...

Changing the System, Not the Climate: July Social PreCOP begins

by nathan thanki Greetings from Las Islas Margaritas, the site of the first ever social preCOP on climate change. Over the past few years on this website you may have read many dispatches, reports, polemics, and laments from the prefabricated halls of various UN climate change negotiations. We have watched and written as the process to negotiate a new global climate treaty (or whatever) was...

The way here and the way forward: negotiating a new climate agreement

by nathan thanki At the end of an unseasonably warm week in Bonn, the sun set on yet another round of UNFCCC (climate change) negotiations. The session, quieter than the end of year COP (Conference of the Parties) jamboree, has only dealt with one negotiating track—the "ADP." The ADP, or Ad-hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (there's a reason we use acronyms), is a...

US submits views on future climate agreement

by nathan thanki Since the Durban round of UN climate talks in 2011, governments have been struggling towards an eventual global agreement to address climate change (ideally, some say they're just negotiating the establishment of more markets). The negotiation process, named the "ADP" (the D stands for Durban) is mandated to conclude in Paris in December 2015 with some kind of outcome. The exact...

Designing for Activism

by nathan thanki There are a surprising many similarities between designing on a computer and designing “in reality,” with bodies instead of pixels. Designing a poster requires many of the same skills as designing a creative direct action. Both are attempting to convey a message, often a demand or a request, through largely visual rhetoric which, like spoken language, has been developed...