* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Everything is impossible until it is done.” The words of Nelson Mandela were quoted repeatedly all around Durban’s vast International Convention Centre (ICC), home for two intense weeks to the United Nations climate change summit (COP 17). And they turned out to be prophetic, yet again.
The conference, begun on November 28 and due to end on Friday, December 9, overran through an exhausting final weekend, climaxing with a compromise but highly significant agreement just before 6 a.m. on Sunday, December 11.
The deal, in which all 194 participating countries agreed to negotiate a new, legally enforceable pact to fight climate change by 2015, had seemed impossible a few hours earlier as differences between industrialised states and the most powerful developing economies appeared unbridgeable. But a pre-dawn diplomatic “arm wrestle” between European Union and India broke the deadlock, with each side givIng a fraction of ground over the exact language, and enabling everyone to accept the deal – many still unhappy that it was nowhere near enough to save the countries most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change, but aware that it kept hope alive.
Keenly following the fray were some 25 journalists invited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Com+, the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development, to attend a media workshop alongside the conference while they covered the COP for their various media. The group consisted of 12 journalists from developing countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, plus nine radio journalists from African countries, chosen through a competition by the UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and half a dozen mainly print journalists from host country South Africa.
The workshop, designed to aid their coverage and enhance understanding of the highly complex issues, included presentations by experts on key themes, notably low carbon energy projects in Africa under the CDM, and a site visit to a project to cut carbon emissions by using solar power for hot water in two villages outside Durban. Participants also attended some of the numerous side events put on within the ICC complex by governments and NGOs, including a colourful World Bank ceremony for winners of the C4C African Photo and Video awards.
Steered by a trainer/mentor from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the group produced at least 200 high quality stories on the main themes of the COP, plus a wide range of target issues and extensive radio and tv material.
(Robert Hart - Dec 14, 2011)
