Report by Feasta.

Any NGO going to a UN climate conference in the hope of influencing the outcome is extremely optimistic. In essence, these conferences are two events – a climate ideas trade show and a series of meetings between government ministers, advisers and officials – going on in the same building at the same time. There is very little contact between them. All the serious negotiation goes on behind closed doors.

So it was in Poznan. Most of the 10,000 people who registered to attend spent their time at the ideas show talking to each other about the work they were doing. If they ever spoke to a senior government negotiator, it would have been someone they already knew from their own national delegation. For the most part, if they ever saw anyone influential, it would have been as he or she walked past, surrounded by a group of assistants.

So, how well did Feasta get on, attempting to sell its ideas to the other participants? And what ideas did some of us buy?

It’s hard to say what our sales actually were until the responses come through but I think the prospects are good. Attendance at our Cap and Share presentation was not as high as we would have liked, but this was to be expected at an event held away from the main hall on the penultimate day of an exhausting process. It is also true that not many people there were making the case – as we were – that similar policies were needed for dealing with both the oil peak and climate change. The evidence for this is that only a dozen people attended Jeremy Leggett’s presentation on oil peak which was in the main building. His article in The Guardian about this appeared under the headline “At Poznan, no one is listening. At the world climate change summit, few delegates paid attention to the tale of oil’s inevitable demise”.

Our event did bear fruit in the form of some influential attendees. One of them described the presentation as the best she had attended at the COP. Another was representing India’s leading environmental NGO, the Centre for Science and Environment, whose leader, Sunita Narain, set out the CSE approach at a side event one of us attended, When told afterwards that what she had presented was almost exactly C&S, she said “I know” and introduced Feasta to Chandra Bhushan, an Associate Director of CSE who has been studying C&S for a few months. Another good contact made was Colin Challen, the MP who chairs the British Parliament’s Cross-Party Climate Change group. We gave him a copy of the Comhar report on C&S and arranged for him to meet John Gormley.

The two reports on C&S in India and South Africa aroused a lot of interest. All the material we had brought from Dublin were taken by callers to our stand within 24 hours of becoming available, so we had to print more in Poland.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing that happened was the unexpected arrival of a member, Fergal Duff, who spent many years working for the UNEP around the world. Fergal spent all his time during his two days in Poznan presenting C&S to his UNEP and other contacts there.

The ideas we bought were both software programmes. One came from Dr. Piotr Magnuszewski of the risk the Risk and Vulnerability Programme at IIASA in Austria. Dr. Magnuszewski is involved in a Polish Feasta-like group which is just completing the development of a game in which the players take on the role of the climate policymakers in specific countries. They set their own reduction targets and then negotiate with the other players. In other words, they do exactly what governments are doing at present.

The big question is: will the results that this process produces be adequate? The danger is that if an agreement is reached in Copenhagen next December, it will commit nations to doing far too little for, say, the following ten years. Moreover, simply as a result of being adopted, the agreement might prevent a more radical arrangement such as C&S being introduced during the period to make cuts of the required size.

The second programme, which shows how deep the emissions cuts might need to be, was shown to us by Beth Sawin of the Sustainability Institute in Vermont who had been asked to seek us out by Nadia Johanisova. Her programme, which will be available for release in February, enables one to calculate the greenhouse gas concentration that would result under differing scenarios.

We tried it out by assuming that Cap and Share was adopted immediately and that emissions were reduced globally by 3% a year. This stabilised the atmospheric concentration at about 450ppmv. If deforestation ceased immediately too, of course, the result was even better but still not enough. In other words, if Copenhagen comes up with anything lesser, humanity will have failed to avert its own demise. We hope to make both programmes available through the Feasta website early next year. They promise to have a very powerful impact on the public debate.

Overall, I think the investment of time, energy and money we made in going to Poznan was worthwhile. Our involvement was necessary in order to maintain and build contacts and to be seen to be part of the debate.