A daily update from within the COP 10 conference. What’s the buzz in the corridors? Who is the latest ‘Fossil of the Day’? Why do new shoes always pinch so much? Meet the Greenpeace team and get a personal view of the negotiations.

Hi, I’m Catherine, one of the energy campaigners from the Greenpeace Australia Pacific office based in Sydney, Australia. And I’m here at Cop10.

I was at the meeting in Kyoto in 1997 when 165 nations signed the Kyoto Protocol so I have quite an interest in these negotiations. The meeting in Kyoto was incredible – there was a strong sense of urgency and momentum. The chairman in Kyoto was Raoul Estrada, an Argentinean diplomat. Interestingly, he is also the chair for this meeting, seven years later.

It is the second last day at the international climate negotiations and it looks like we are for a long night. You probably know by now, having read all the previous diaries, that a package of agreements of how to move forward on climate protection is being negotiated.

Since there is only one day left before the meeting must finish, most of the negotiators will spend most of the night trying to agree on the way forward. And let’s hope that they do because billions of people around the world need this meeting to take climate change seriously and commit to real action, rather than flowery words and small promises.

My day starting with me sleeping through my alarm and having about 10 mins. to get out the door to get to our daily team meeting at the conference centre in Buenos Aires! When I did arrive, on time, we had a quick briefing on where the negotiations were up to and what issues needed to be covered during the day.

Later in the morning, on behalf of Greenpeace and our millions of supporters, I met with the Australian Environment Minister, Senator Ian Campbell. It is the first time Australia’s new Environment Minister has come to the climate negotiations.

It was encouraging to hear him focus on adaptation and the vulnerability of Australia and Pacific Island countries to climate impacts. We talked about climate impacts in Australia but also the fact that there is not enough being done to help Australians move away from burning fossil fuels towards clean renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Which makes perfect sense for a country like Australia that receives enough sunlight per hour to power the whole country for a year!

In Australia, the climate impacts we face are very serious. For example, the Great Barrier Reef is at risk from coral bleaching. Coral bleaching occurs when high sea temperatures force the algae that gives coral its color out of the coral polyps. Usually, bleached coral recovers in the next cool season, but if all the algae are lost, the coral will die and reefs will crumble. Climate models predict that many areas of the Great Barrier Reef will be dead by the end of this century.

Unfortunately the Minister’s speech to the Plenary failed to show clear support for moving forward and away from the United States isolated position on global warming. (A US proposal recommends that seminars, designed to move the negotiations forward after the first Kyoto Commitment period from 2008 to 2012, will be limited in participation, will not provide written reports, will not discuss future targets after 2012 or even the Kyoto Protocol.)

If these talks fail to move ahead because of the USA and because of vicious lobbying by the US and oil interests here, the question will be, did Australia also have a hand in ensuring its failure? It would be a pathetic Xmas present to the world to be left without strong steps to avoid dangerous climate change.

The rest of the day was spent drafting media releases, attending lots of meetings, gathering information, monitoring the Australian Government’s and meeting new people involved in the negotiations.

Now it is close to midnight – I have just finished helping Yu Jie from our China office write a speech she is giving on behalf of the Climate Action Network tomorrow in the Plenary. And tomorrow we will see whether all the nations gathered have been able to put aside their own national interests for the sake of the planet and the sake of future generations.

Hi, my name is Athena and I am from the Philippines, that tiny archipelagic country in South East Asia which was hit recently by a spate of typhoons. When I left the country to come to this meeting, the death toll was a chilling 640 bodies - more than 10,000 displaced and affected - and millions in damages to property and agriculture.

Well, that’s my country, all right, always in a state of calamity. I remember growing up in a part of the city that occasionally got submerged in floodwaters when a really strong typhoon hit the country with powerful winds. It didn’t happen very often but when it strikes, the community is usually unprepared.

This has now become a common sight in many parts of the country every time a typhoon strikes. Yes, some of these events may or may not be directly attributable to climate change but the frequency, severity and intensity of these extreme events could well be.

I started to reflect on this while sitting here in Buenos Aires waiting for the negotiations to resume. It is midnight and many are still around anticipating some form of progress. It’s not like we are not used to this late hour game.

Yesterday some of the talks finished at 2.30 am, and some went till 3.30 am. The security folks teased us and suggested that we bring our sleeping bags and breakfast next time.

You would think that given the long hours of negotiations so much progress would have been made, so much ground covered. Well unfortunately progress is slow. There is no sense of urgency. Procrastination is the attitude of the day and of the entire week.

Why? Because the politicians who are here are not representative of what is going on in the real world where real people, real communities, real ecosystems are facing serious risks from climate change.

Except for a small group of countries (those from small islands and Africa in particular who are the poorest and most vulnerable) the majority comfortably sits and wait. Why delay action? Well because for one the rich and the powerful are already in the thick of preparations to protect themselves from the threats of climate change.

They have the means and the resources and they do not need any form of text or mandate to mobilize their own resources to help them cope with the adverse effects of climate change.

But some of our countries do and this to me is the unfortunate sad reality. Developing countries are the most vulnerable yet are least able to cope and we are not even responsible for the bulk of the emissions causing climate change, yet we have an urgent need to adapt, cope and survive.

This immorality must be exposed. One country - Saudi Arabia – earned more than 10 billion US dollars in net oil revenues and registered a staggering 13% increase in growth. This is so many times more than the resources of a small Pacific country. Yet the rich continue to punish the poor, not only by continuously pumping emissions into the atmosphere and causing climate change but also by blocking progress on crucial agenda items here in the current negotiations.

It is absurd isn’t it? These individuals represent the wealthiest of all nations. They return to their luxurious homes brimming with pride and satisfied with the fact that they have again successfully blocked talks to address climate change. In the meantime poverty, hunger and devastation reign in some of the poorest, most vulnerable regions of Africa and Asia.

When I return next week to the Philippines, it will only be 3 days before Christmas. That time of the year when families get together and celebrate the holidays. Unfortunately for the thousands of families displaced by the recent typhoons, there will be no Christmas celebration. They have no homes, no land to till, no property saved and no community to turn to for refuge. Imagine what the future will bring if this attitude of procrastination continues. Imagine what dangerous climate change really means and what further harm it will do to our peoples.

But as they say, there is always hope. Hope springs eternal. Maybe tomorrow things will be better...

The most flabbergasting experience of this 5th day was the question of the woman at the coffee bar, looking at my lanyard with the slogan YES TO KYOTO, NO TO BUSH on. It says it all, but she asked: 'What is Kyoto?. Searching for an answer I tried: 'Well, ehh, Kyoto is about climate change' and from her look, I saw she didn't get it. So I tried: 'It's about stopping air pollution and ehh ......’. She laughed a little, looking at the smoking people around me, and our worlds split.

This small talk at the coffee bar reflects the same sort of split that can be seen here at the climate talks. 'What if?' is the cloudy question, that is still to be answered by the countries 5 days after the beginning of the climate talks, here at COP10 in sunny Buenos Aires.

Climate change: the everyday growing threat of the planet, is verbally recognized by most countries but where is the political urgency and actions to do something about it?
So:

What if the USA, the world's largest creator of climate change, keeps listening to the fossil fuel industry and refusing to take responsibility?

What if the European Union, where I come from, doesn't take up a credible leadership role, ignore the US unwillingness, and build coalitions of willing countries to move ahead?

What if countries continue to see only as threats the solutions that are available, missing the point that new, clean, technologies deliver lots of chances and opportunities to heal the planet and contribute to sustainable development and the economy at the same time?

Answer – the costs of such inaction will be enormous.

But inaction will not be accepted by the millions at risk globally, who suffer now and/or in the future from the impacts of climate change and are already paying the costs.

The woman at the coffee bar will realize one day that she witnessed an historical event. Will her interests and those of her children be neglected or served here in Buenos Aires?

One thing is clear - climate change is a weapon of mass destruction. Industries and politicians claim to be worried and aware about that but they are still trying to get short term economic benefits without taking care of social and environmental issues. They simply don’t care about the environment, and don’t care about society. In a couple of words - they don’t care about life.

It’s amazing to see almost all the countries in the world in one place trying to stop climate change impacts but is incredible how a group of countries can potentially stop real advances. For example today I attended a workshop that was supposed to find the ways to stop climate change using “new technologies”. So you can imagine things like wind energy, solar, new biomass, geothermal or oceanic and all form of renewable energy currently underused worldwide. I know there is a lot of intent to avoid fossil fuel phase out but I was still amazed that the promotion of coal was one of the main presentations.

You read right, COAL, the worst of the fossil fuels presented as a solution. The conclusion was that where coal is needed to supply electricity and in general economic growth (not mentioning the cost from the impacts generates) coal will help populations and will bring social benefits (they forgot to say how and which benefits). They also said that coal will help sustainable development and so on. I don’t want to bore you, (I already sat through that presentation so you don’t have to. ;-) but after that brainwashing I really don’t remember at this point if they said at the end or not that coal is God!

But I’m missing the main important thing about climate change: Developing countries will be the most affected, I’m sure we will be telling you more about this issue, meanwhile I have short but good example related to US and Mexico that shows to our neighbors what we mean when we say that. You all know that we share a long border with US. In the Pacific when a storm arrives, for the Mexican side it means floods, loss of infrastructure and loss of lives, while the same storm has much less impact on the US side because of stronger buildings, better emergency response and better protection.

I have a feeling. Do you want to know what I really think? The US will sign Kyoto, or will be pushed by the rest of the world into committing to reduce its emissions. I wish! you say? Big battle, It will be a hard battle of course, but this is our work and at the end, in spite of all the long meetings and boring speeches with no concrete commitment we will still be committed to take actions to protect not just the environment but the relationship that we as humanity have with it. To achieve sustainable equity. To fight, in a few words, for life. I think this is what give us strength and hope after long meetings and interminable days.

Hello from Buenos Aires! Today was the third day of COP 10, and things seem to be getting busier and more interesting by the day. Being from the US (you’ll remember, the largest polluters who refuse to sign Kyoto or take any real action to stop climate change), I get to spend a lot of my day following the US delegation around, listening to all their lies and challenging their attempts to delay action on climate change. Today was the first official side event put on by the US delegation and it was full of promotions of President Bush’s technological initiatives and information about the billions of dollars the US is spending on scientific research and technological advances. It’s important to remember that:

Actually, today at the US event, I asked Harlan Watson (chief negotiator for the US) when any of these voluntary programs will actually reduce overall emissions and he said he couldn’t give me an answer. All of this money on research and they have no forecasts of when their projects will amount to anything at all…

Thankfully, after the event many people approached me to talk about the presentation we had just seen, and it seems that people are all seeing through the lies of the Bush Administration and weren’t impressed at all. I’m sure they have many more tricks up their sleeves, though, so I’ll be sure to keep my eyes and ears open.

Phew! Day three of the climate talks and the first opportunity to sit down and write a piece for the diary. It’s simple enough to keep track of what’s going on when everybody is in one big meeting room but these UN conferences are like amoeba. They start subdividing early on and you soon find yourself having to be in six places at once and that’s without taking into account the monitoring of the impromptu corridor huddles. I predict it will get even more hectic when all the Ministers arrive next week.

The usual suspects have been hard at work over the last few days, trying to appear concerned about climate change while taking no action themselves and attempting to stop others from making progress in the talks.

The USA boasted about its expensive ‘clean technology’ R&D programme but then had to admit that the hydrogen and fusion projects would not begin to have an effect until 2035 and 2050 respectively. Not much comfort to those people who are already watching their belongings float away in rivers of floodwater.

Australia smugly announced that it was on track to meet its Kyoto targets (even though it hasn’t ratified the treaty). Turns out the only reason for this is they have stopped tearing down so many forests. In every other sector, emissions are spiralling out of control.

Saudi Arabia continues to pretend that loss of revenue from oil is a climate impact and demanding that if the world starts to move away from fossil fuels they should be compensated - from a fund that has been set up to help countries deal with real climate related disasters.

And so it goes on.

Have to dash now to a meeting hosted by industry groups. They’re patting themselves on the back for what they are calling ‘achievements in climate change. Better described as achievements in changing the climate’, I think.