Arrival

I have been fortunate enough to be awarded a 2010 Climate Media Fellowship from Earth Journalism News to cover this year's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16) in Cancun. This is a phenomenal opportunity for me to participate in bringing attention and awareness to what I feel is one of the most crucial and defining issues of our time. Last year, I reported from outside the highly anticipated COP 15 summit in Copenhagen and was blown away by the amount of activism and engagement in the streets and underwhelmed by the UN's lack of progress toward coming to a binding agreement on how to address climate change.

This year, thanks to Internews' Earth Journalism Network, I will be on the inside reporting on the UN negotiating process itself. As there's a steep learning curve on the complex process of United Nations climate negotiations, I've started this blog in part to document the learning process, post links to my work, and try to make sense of the world's attempts to solve the problem of climate change.
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I am not fond of Cancun. To me, it's a place that represents the extreme juxtaposition between the ultra rich and the ultra poor, an anachronistic first world tourist haven where mostly affluent white people from the United States get served and waited on by mostly brown skinned people who live in relative poverty. It's the kind of place that epitomizes the class war between the first and third world. The fact that this class war, the divide between the rich and poor nations of the world, is at the heart of the climate change debate, is not lost on the choosing of Cancun as the host city to this year's negotiations. So, it's with this resort town / slum town as the scenic backdrop to these important meetings, that I start my work. Please stay tuned for my reports.