After nearly a year on the road, around 5,000 miles covered and 250 species in the bag, Gary Prescott, aka the biking birder, has finally become the first person ever to visit every RSPB nature reserve in one year, and on a bike no less!
Gary, a special needs teacher from Warwick, finally finished his epic journey on Saturday 18 December with a trip to the RSPB’s HQ at the Lodge, Bedfordshire. An escort of honour, made up of RSPB staff members, met him in one of the neighbouring villages and cycled the last few miles with him.
Amongst those willing to brave the weather were members of the RSPB’s climate change policy and campaigns team. One of the aims of Gary’s expedition was to raise awareness about the threats posed by climate change so it was the least we could do to come out and support him on the last leg of his journey! Gary’s been visiting schools around the UK, spreading the message about the threat of climate change and encouraging his young audiences to do their bit to halt it.
Before he began his journey on 1 January, Gary said “I would like people to think about what they are going to do to help prevent catastrophic climate change.” As well as flying the flag for climate change awareness, Gary has also been raising money for the RSPB, the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, and Asthma UK.
Despite the weather’s best efforts, Gary has finally made it home, so all that’s left to say is congratulations and thank you!
To much applause from those assembled, early on Saturday morning (11 December) a deal on climate change was agreed here in Cancun. Whilst the content of the agreement will scarcely scratch the surface of the climate crisis, the fact that agreement was possible is remarkable following the bad faith and mistrust engendered by Copenhagen just a year ago.
In the end, the only country that looked like blocking a deal was Bolivia, but on the grounds that the agreement was not ambitious enough rather than simply being obstructive. Japan looked a threat for a while, but a series of phone calls to the PM from other leaders, including President Calderon of Mexico and David Cameron, fixed the problem. The country that made the agreement possible was Mexico, whose minster, Patricia Espinosa, consulted endlessly with everyone together with her huge team, including the President.
Some have accused the agreement as papering over the cracks of fundamental differences between nations. But this is true of any multilateral agreement - everyone has to compromise and in Cancun everyone did compromise in an open and transparent process.
At best, this meeting was intended to break the logjam of mistrust amongst nations and define ways forward to a comprehensive agreement in Durban next year. This it has done.
Important deals on substance were also made here. A green fund is established that will help pay for developing countries to both reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change. A scheme to save tropical forest is established, with excellent safeguards for biodiversity and the rights of indigenous people - the RSPB can claim a share of the credit for this. Much more work is still to be done on these matters but the show is on the road again and confidence is high.
It is strangely silent here now. The players in the big UN circus have decamped leaving a few bemused Mexican tourists in our vast hotel complex. The shell shocked iguanas are coming out of their holes to their place in the sun and the caimans are again gliding around the ponds.
John
Some good news at last! The UN climate talks in Cancun have ended in a deal which represent a small but significant step towards a global climate deal that keeps global climate change within ‘safe’ limits.
In addition to some solid commitments, including a new green climate fund that will go towards protecting rainforests, reducing emissions and adapting to climate change in developing countries, the deal has effectively saved the multilateral process. Had the Cancun talks broken down into acrimony as they did in Copenhagen, it could have been the end of the line for the climate talks.
Instead, we can now work towards a global deal at the next UNFCCC meeting this time next year in South Africa.
We’ll post more analysis of the deal here in due course, and particularly what it will mean for forests, which is what the RSPB has been working particularly hard on throughout these talks.
Here’s what John Lanchbery, our lead on the UN climate talks and forests expert had to say before finally retiring to the beach after 2 weeks hard work -
“The deal is done. The UN climate talks go forward. The multilateral process lives after its near death experience in Copenhagen. Nations worked together in Cancun under the excellent leadership of Mexico.”
“Much remains to be done over the next year but core deals were done here on vital issues. There is to be a green fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change and a good start was made on a global regime to save tropical forests.”
“The world is still far from being saved but the prospects are looking much better.”
You can see a picture of John and Mel doing their thing in Copenhagen in a nice photo gallery on the Guardian website here
And finally, here's a pic of a Yucatan Jay watching in on the negotiations snapped by Mel on her blackberry as she hurried between meetings....
An
Cancun is most notable by its absence in most of the UK media at the moment, so here's some more news straight from Mel Coath, who is in Cancun for the RSPB, working on land use and forestry issues -
The Ministers have arrived! Some of them anyway. Chris Huhne and Greg Barker have arrived from the UK after their plane was grounded in Gatwick for a day due to a technical fault. Chris Huhne has already leapt into the driving seat, being invited to chair important talks on targets. I look forward to hearing more about this in our meeting with him tomorrow. In particular I’ll be asking him if he intends to show leadership in closing the loopholes being created by land use change and forestry rules and help stop these rules undermining the targets.
It’ll be interesting to see what ends up being put before Ministers on land use and forestry. Finalising the elements of the rules on this strand is proving a tough job for negotiators sand the text has ballooned over the last week rather than been cut down. Some of the new options represent compromises between the approach with environmental integrity that we’ve been suggesting as NGOs and the blatant cheating being proposed by many countries So while not fixing the problem, anything that shrinks the loophole is a step forward at this stage and we’ll be tracking these compromises with interest
Meanwhile the extremely long working days and lack of any time to rest (no weekend for us!) is starting to take its toll on negotiators and NGOs alike. Glazed expressions and frayed tempers are inevitable as exhaustion increases and pressure mounts. We spend our days within 100 metres from a beach but I haven’t seen it yet! We did see some cute coatimundis though (like a small, pointy nosed racoon with a long tail) going down the drive to the conference centre this morning and yesterday we spotted a cayman “un crocodillo” in a pool by the University where we held our strategy session
More news from our small and very busy delegation in Cancun -
Until now my feet have barely touched the ground – in both the LULUCF negotiations and our efforts to influence them it’s been non-stop. For the first couple of the days of the negotiations things looked to be going pretty smoothly – a new text was warmly welcomed by those who will benefit from fraudulent forest rules. The loss of one whole chunk (how you treat emissions from natural disturbances) caused those Parties with a vested interest to scurry round and come up with something workable to go back in. But that was just a small ripple in the LULUCF pond.
Then yesterday, Tuvalu, the small island state with a bleak watery future, created waves with a dramatic new proposal to delete great swathes of the forest rules that countries have been negotiating for the last 3 years in favour of going back to the old system (also bad but in a different way). The Africa Group followed that with a new compromise solution that doesn’t solve the problems but makes them a little less bad. So interesting times, and now of course they’re all panicking because the Ministers arrive next week and they only had one negotiating session remaining! I have a feeling some more will be scheduled rapidly.
Meanwhile we’ve been in our usual whirl of bilateral meetings with Countries, producing briefings and responses to developments, writing articles for the widely read NGO newsletter ECO and catching the negotiators in the corridor as often as possible to gain intelligence on what’s going on behind closed doors. There have been no meetings on LULUCF here that are open to observers which is really frustrating and shows how little they value transparency in their negotiations.
On a different note, and seeing as this is an RSPB blog, I am writing this outside and the birdsong is dramatically different here – loud whistles and chirrups from the palm trees, nothing like a robin or blackbird – impossible to set as background noise! Anyway I’d better finish this, almost time to head back in for a meeting with the UK delegation.