From:  jaiganesh09 at gmail.com
Subject: 2nd Regional Training Course on Climate Risk Management: Science, Institutions, and Society
Date: September 9, 2008

2nd Regional Training Course on Climate Risk Management: Science, Institutions, and Society.

Greetings from ADPC!

The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) will offer the Second Regional Training Course on Climate Risk Management: Science, Institutions, and Society from 17 to 28 November 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand. The course aims to build the capacity of professionals to manage risks associated with climate variability, change, and extremes. It builds upon ADPC’s two decades of experience in disaster management, facilitating regional cooperation and building capacities of disaster management institutions, disaster management practitioners, and communities, and a decade of experience in institutionalizing climate information applications for disaster mitigation. It incorporates case studies and sectoral examples from climate risk management programs and projects all over Asia.

Upon completing the course, participants will be able to:

1) design early warning systems for climate-related risks;

2) design climate risk management, climate forecast applications, and climate change adaptation projects, and

3) develop tools to integrate climate risk management practices into development programs and policies.

The first CRM course offering was completed in May 2008 with 27 participants from 14 countries. For more details, please check out the course brochure at http://www.adpc.net/v2007/Downloads/2008…. Please contact me ( jaiganeshm at adpc.net) or my colleague Ms.Kareff Rafisura ( kareff at adpc.net) if you have any questions.

Jaiganesh Murugesan
Disaster Reduction Specialist
Climate Risk Management / Early Warning Systems
Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC)
979/66-70, 24th Floor
SM Tower, Paholyothin Road , Samsen Nai, Phayathai,
Bangkok, 10400
Thailand
Tel : (66-2) 298 0682-92 (Ext-205 )
Fax : (66-2) 298 0012-13
URL: www.adpc.net

Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning Center
P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang,
Pathumthani, 12120
Thailand
Tel : 02-5165900-03
Fax : 02-5245350,60

From:  UNDP-newsroom at undp.org

Corruption Hits Poor the Hardest.

UNDP Report Examines Priority Areas for Tackling Corruption in Asia-Pacific

Jakarta, Indonesia, 12 June 2008—Cleaning up the police, health, education and environment sectors should be a top political priority in the Asia-Pacific region, in order to loosen the stranglehold of corruption on the lives of the poor, according to a new United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report released here today.

The Report, entitled Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives, vividly illustrates how the region’s pervasive ‘petty’ corruption smothers opportunities for the most vulnerable people, limiting their access to education and compromising basic health services. It also provides innovative ways in which communities and governments are striving to fight corruption in Asia, including Indonesia.

The Report was launched by the President of Indonesia, His Excellency Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Director of the Bureau for Policy Development, Olav Kjørven, and the Minister of Development Planning, His Excellency Paskah Suzetta.

The publication quotes President Yudhoyono shortly after his election in 2004: “The eradication of corruption will be my priority over the next five years. We have to eradicate it structurally and culturally…This country will be destroyed if we do not stop the growth of corruption. There needs to be some shock therapy so that the people know that this government is serious about corruption.”

Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives stresses that while anti-corruption efforts too often focus on exposing the ‘big fish’, it is ‘small fry’ corruption —from the salaries of fictitious ‘ghost teachers’ funnelled into the pockets of corrupt officials, to doctors demanding cash payments from poor, pregnant women to deliver their babies, which causes more day-to-day suffering and could severely hamper the Region’s goal of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)— the eight internationally-agreed targets aimed at halving poverty by 2015.

“Hauling the rich and powerful before the courts may grab the headlines, but the poor will benefit more from efforts to eliminate the corruption that plagues their everyday lives,” says Anuradha Rajivan, Head of the UNDP Regional Human Development Report Unit. “Petty corruption is a misnomer. Dollar amounts may be relatively small but the demands are incessant, the number of people affected is enormous and the share of poor people’s income diverted to corruption is high,” she said.

“Corruption does not grease the wheels; it is a spanner in the works,” says Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the Head of the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency for Aceh and Nias, Indonesia in the Report. Teten Masduki, the head of Indonesia Corruption Watch calls “for a grand coalition between government and non-government reform forces” to fight corruption in bureaucracy and formal politics in his contribution to the publication.

The Report stresses that combating corruption makes more political sense now than ever before, especially in sectors like water and electricity, health and education, as it “not only confers credibility to the government, it also greatly promotes everyday citizen satisfaction.” With that in mind, the Report proposes a menu of options for political leaders in the Region to consider.

Justice for sale
In Asia-Pacific, politicians are seen as the most corrupt group in government followed by the police, with the judiciary running a close third. Nearly one in five people claim to have paid a bribe to police during the previous year in the Asia-Pacific region. Only a quarter of crimes are ever reported in Asia, according to Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives. In various Asia-Pacific countries, when victims were asked why they did not report a crime, between one third and three quarters cited lack of trust in the police as a reason. Justice too has a price, and two-thirds of the Asian population considers the courts to be corrupt, note the authors.

Greed vs. need in social services
Putting greed over need in corrupt health care systems diverts funds from immunization programmes, and adds to the millions of children who die in the region each year as a result of diarrhoea and disease caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.

Giving bribes for admission to a hospital —or for new mothers even to see their babies in a maternity ward— is common in South Asia. “One survey of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka found that health workers often demanded bribes for admission to hospital, to provide a bed, or to give subsidized medications,” says the Report.

At the same time, up to one-third of drugs supplied in some countries of the region may be expired or counterfeit and the poor often shoulder a significant burden to buy bandages or syringes when hospitals run short of supplies.

“Some cross-national studies have indeed suggested that in countries where levels of corruption are higher, some health inputs such as immunization are lower,” says the Report. According to a global study, child mortality could be halved with a two-point increase in the World Bank’s Control of Corruption Index.

In education, the Report shows that higher levels of corruption are correlated with fewer children attending schools and higher dropout and illiteracy rates, blocking key routes out of poverty. An extreme type of education corruption is found in ‘ghost teachers’ who may be on a payroll but never set foot in a classroom. Even ‘ghost schools’ exist.

Meanwhile, extending water, sanitation and electricity coverage is expensive, requiring large-scale investments in infrastructure —yet up to 40 percent of this is being dissipated through bid rigging and other corruption, the Report said. The poor have no choice but to pay ‘speed money’ just to get a utility connection. One survey in Bangladesh found that 60 percent of urban households either paid money or exerted influence to get water connections.

Natural resources up for grabs
The vast tropical forests, extensive mineral deposits and fertile agricultural lands of many Asian-Pacific countries should serve as a firm basis for economic and human development, says Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives, but too often their potential is drained away through corruption. The sheer volume of profit to be made through shady or illegal handling of natural resources means that corruption in this field often amounts to ‘state capture,’ where private companies pay public officials to shape laws, policies and regulations to their advantage.

In Indonesia, less than one-fourth of total logging operations, estimated at US$6.6 billion, is legal. Informal payments and bribes related to logging are estimated at over $1 billion annually.

Illegal logging, like other corrupt natural resources management practices, is particularly damaging for the poorest communities, explains the Report. For example, small farmers and indigenous people are driven into poverty as a result of illegal land expropriations and the exhaustion of natural resources, and local communities are left to suffer the health effects of toxic waste from mining illegally dumped into nearby rivers.

Keeping them honest
Innovative communities are now hitting back at corruption levels in the region, shows the Report. For example, in some schools in Indonesia, corruption in the management of funds has been minimized by involving parent’s associations, which decide on the use of these funds and monitor them to ensure they reach their intended destination. School officials meet with representatives of the parents’ association at the beginning of the school year to agree on an annual plan. During the year they provide them with detailed accounting of expenditures.

In the rural, one-teacher schools of the region of Rajasthan, India, where teacher absentee rates have topped 40 percent, a local non-governmental organization came up with a novel solution that required teachers to take a photo of themselves with the students at the beginning and end of each day using cameras with tamper-proof date and time functions in order to get their maximum salary. As a result, the number of days that children were actually taught each month increased by one third.

In Cambodia, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority made the decision to become transparent and to pay its staff based on their performance. Between 1999 and 2006, access to water in the city was transformed, jumping from 25 percent to 90 percent, while the number of household connections for the poorest people in the city rose from 100 to more than 13,000, the Report said.

At the national level, putting the right anti-corruption legislation in place —and enforcing it— has also produced success stories. In China, for example, a law was introduced in 2006 stipulating that staff members of schools and hospitals would face criminal penalties for seeking bribes or receiving kickbacks. The former Commissioner of the State Food and Drug Administration was subsequently convicted on charges of accepting more than $850,000 in bribes.

Call to an Agenda for Action
The Report argues that no single answer to the problem of corruption exists, but that a number of options are common across most countries in the region:

· Raising salaries for doctors, teachers and other civil servants so they do not have to rely on bribes to make a living; making civil service posts more merit-based; and strengthening oversight mechanisms by local governments (bureaucracy reform)
· Encouraging business codes of conduct that fit international standards
· Enacting and implementing the right to information laws
· Using information technology and e-governance to make administration more transparent
· Supporting citizen action to combat corruption by mandating that local governments publish basic information on contracts to facilitate citizen auditing

Since 2006, Asia-Pacific Human Development Reports have evolved into a regular series. Reports provide continuing analyses of critical development issues relevant at both the regional and country levels. The Asia-Pacific Human Development Report Series offers the region a forum for furthering dialogues and structuring debates to support a pro-poor agenda.

For further information, please contact:

Jakarta:
Surekha Subarwal, email:  surekha.subarwal at undp.org; mobile: (91 98) 1015 3924

Nina Doyle, email:  nina.doyle at undp.org; mobile: +62 (0)812 105 2796

Regi Wahono, email:  regi.wahono at undp.org; mobile: +62 (0)817 9900712

New York:
Cassandra Waldon; email:  cassandra.waldon at undp.org; telephone: +1 212 906 6499, or UNDP Newsroom; email:  undp-newsroom at undp.org; telephone: +1 212 906 5382.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UN’s global development network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build better lives. UNDP works in 37 countries in Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.undp.org

—————–
The UNDP Washington Bulletin is a regular update of UNDP activities and events by the Washington Office.   June 2008 issue.

Tackling Corruption in the Asia-Pacific region:
New UNDP report examines priority areas, shares innovations, makes recommendations

A regional UNDP Human Development Report released this month argues that cleaning up the police, health, education and environment sectors should be a top political priority in the Asia-Pacific region in order to loosen the stranglehold of corruption on the lives of the poor.

The report was launched on June 12th in Jakarta by the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; UN Assistant Secretary General and UNDP Director of the Bureau for Policy Development, Olav Kjørvan; and the Indonesian Minister of Development Planning, Paskah Suzetta.

Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives illustrates how the region’s pervasive petty corruption smothers opportunities for the most vulnerable people, limiting their access to education and compromising basic health services. The report stresses that while anti-corruption efforts too often focus on exposing the ‘big fish’, it is ‘small fry’ corruption—from the salaries of fictitious ‘ghost teachers’ funneled into the pockets of corrupt officials, to doctors demanding cash payments from poor, pregnant women to deliver their babies—which causes more day-to-day suffering and could severely hamper the region’s development.

Agenda for action:
The report argues that no single answer to the problem of corruption exists, but that a number of options are common across most countries in the region:
·         Raising salaries for doctors, teachers and other civil servants so they do not have to rely on bribes to make a living; making civil service posts more merit-based; and strengthening oversight mechanisms by local governments
·         Encouraging business codes of conduct that fit international standards
·         Enacting and implementing the right to information laws
·         Using information technology and e-governance to make administration more transparent
·         Supporting citizen action to combat corruption by mandating that local governments publish basic information on contracts to facilitate citizen auditing.

To download the report, click here.  http://www.undprcc.lk/ext/crhdr/Download…

UNDP Anti-Corruption Public Service Announcements:

The UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok has produced a 30-second Public Service Announcement on anti-corruption, called Vanishing. It was produced for television broadcast on national, regional and international networks. Its simple message illustrates how corruption affects everyone – local communities, schools, hospitals, villages.

Another 30-second Public Service Announcement, also on corruption, is an animation called Cutting Corruption. This UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok TV production shows that corruption eats away at your future and warns its audience not to be a part of it.

 http://regionalcentrebangkok.undp.or.th/…

World Economic Forum: “Dire Situations Call for Bold Measures.”

The World Economic Forum on East Asia wrapped up this week with Ahn Ho-Young, South Korea’s Deput  Minister for Trade, saying it was dominated by “the three F’s”: food, fuel and finance.

A forum survey of the 55 business leaders who attended the two-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, showed that an overwhelming 81% voted for “addressing growing global concern over environmental challenges such as climate change and water” as the top issue facing Asia.

Also of concern were “preventing political and economic instability linked to rising food and energy prices” and “managing the social, environmental and infrastructural implications of rapid urbanization.”
The survey also revealed that the price of rice had more than tripled in Thailand since January. During the same time, diesel prices have risen over 26% in Vietnam.
Water is another issue rising to the fore, with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board, Nestle, Switzerland, repeating his dire warning: “We will be running out of water long before we run out of oil.”

He lamented that more of the world’s GDP was not being allocated to water: “One out of every five children is dying every 20 seconds because we haven’t been able to solve the problem of clean water today.”

Mr. Ho-Young (South Korea)  urged Asia to do three things: “First, it is important for Asian countries to maintain their open market policies which will enable us to maintain the momentum of economic growth,” he said. Second, he urged Asian countries to pay more attention to the economic and social impacts imposed by the global economic uncertainties. Third, “Asian countries should and must play a more active role in solving global issues,” he said (Xinhua).
In his opening remarks, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah bin Ahmad Badawi referred to fundamental questions, primary assumptions, and revered assumptions, that had to be reviewed and re-evaluated. “Unless we are prepared to address these questions sincerely and take necessary remedial measures,” he said, “our economies and the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people will continue to be vulnerable. Dire situations call for bold measures” (The Toronto Star).

East Asia (generally consisting of Japan, North and South Korea, China, Taiwan, with Vietnam and Singapore) has come to the realization that it is now in a position to react positively, with the best interests of the region in mind, to the world’s economic challenges.

UN MEETING EXPLORES HOW TO BOOST ECONOMIES OF LANDLOCKED DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

Experts from Asia and Europe have gathered at a United Nations-backed meeting which opened today in Bangkok to discuss progress made in efforts to link landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) in the Asia-Pacific region to sea ports.

The two-day talks will centre around assessing developments since the adoption of the UN’s Almaty Programme of Action in 2003, which is the first global action plan negotiated at the ministerial level that provides a framework for cooperation between landlocked and the transit access developing countries, promising reductions in red tape and transportation costs and time.

The meeting has been organized by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), along with the UN Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (UN-OHRLLS).

Presentations will be made by LLDC Member States of ESCAP – Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – and by transit countries, including China, Iran and Russia.

Also kicking off in Bangkok today is a meeting of 40 representatives from the Asia-Pacific region to confer on how to boost employment in the Pacific islands.

They will also discuss how the UN can support efforts towards sustainable development in the region.

* * *

POOREST COUNTRIES HAVE YET TO BENEFIT FROM TRADE LIBERALIZATION – UN OFFICIAL

Landlocked and least developed countries (LDCs) have been further marginalized as a result of trade liberalization, which has led to increased growth in many parts of the world, a senior United Nations official has said.

Addressing the 12th UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), taking place in Accra, Ghana, Cheick Sidi Diarra lamented the fact that many of these countries have experienced a further loss of their market share as a result of trade liberalization.

Mr. Diarra, the UN’s High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, noted that globalization, which is supposed to lead to economic growth and reduce poverty, has served to deepen the disparities between and within countries.

To further integrate LDCs into the world economy, he called for domestic policies that support technological progress and innovation, as well as employment creation and upgrading of physical infrastructure. This must be accompanied by the creation of an enabling global environment, he added.

* * *

The Ohel Ayalah Community led by conservative Rabbi Judith Hauptman, a Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, held this year’s Passover Seder in the Banquet Hall of the First Presbyterian Church in the Village -on Fifth Avenue at West 12t Street.    The Haggadah that was used was “The Lively Seder Haggadah” by Dr. David Arnow that combines the traditional text with a look at our world today. The real world intruded into the deliberations at this Seder more then at the UN. Participation was by tables. There were 17 tables with the full house I estimated at over 150 people.

BUT SLAVERY IS STILL A REALITY TODAY:

And Just Look At a Story out of Sudan:

FOR THE THE PART OF THIS SEDER THAT TOUCHED UPON CLIMATE CHANGE - AN INSERT THAT WENT BEYOND THE ARNOW HAGGADAH  - AND SPILLED OVER INTO THE SERVING CUPS AND PLATES -
WE ARE RESERVING  A SEPARATE POSTING.

But, nevertheless, let us point out here that as per added material to the Arnow Haggadah, there were two pages written by Rabbi Jeff Sultar and Julia Porper, that point out that PASSOVER IS ABOUT RENEWAL OF EARTH-LIFE IN THE SPRING - something that in Hebrew is expressed as THE FESTIVAL OF SPRING - CHAG HAAVIV - as well as about the renewing of our freedom from oppression - OPPRESIVE TOP_DOWN POWER (as the insert says).

BOTH ABOVE ISSUES ARE RAISED IN THE DANGERS ENHANCED BY THE GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS.

The Face of a Prophet. Corrected twice by the NYT)

By LOUISE STORY, Published: April 11, 2008.

George Soros will not go quietly. George Soros wants to make a lasting contribution to economic understanding.

Robert Soros, right, never shared the enthusiasm of his father George, for following the markets. Robert is one of five Soros children

At the age of 77, Mr. Soros, one the world’s most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfolding crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund — and won big while so many others lost.

Mr. Soros has always been a controversial figure. But he is becoming more so with a new, dire forecast for the world economy. Last week he rushed out a book, his 10th, warning that the financial pain has only just begun. { There is no book out yet but the electronic version is available and www.SustainabiliTank.info wrote about this as reseived from George Soros see under April 4, 2008 http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2008/04…}

(this just shows that non conventional media gets the news out - sometimes - well ahead of the need-your-agreement-first old style media}
“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,” Mr. Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A “superbubble” that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said.

{and above we had already from his first “coming out” this year -     http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2008/01….

Soros, whose daring, controversial trades came to symbolize global capitalism in the 1990s, is now busy promoting his book, “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets,” which goes on sale mid-May. An electronic version is already available online.

And yet this is not the first time that Mr. Soros has prophesied doom. In 1998, he published a book predicting a global economic collapse that never came.

Mr. Soros thinks that this time he is right. Now in his eighth decade, he yearns to be remembered not only as a great trader but also as a great thinker. The market theory he has promoted for two decades and espoused most of his life — something he calls “reflexivity” — is still dismissed by many economists. The idea is that people’s biases and actions can affect the direction of the underlying economy, undermining the conventional theory that markets tend toward some sort of equilibrium.

Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life — finance, philanthropy, even politics — are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our understanding of reality would be my greatest accomplishment,” he said.

Mr. Soros has been worrying about the fragile state of the markets for years. But last summer, at a luncheon at his home in Southampton with 20 prominent financiers, he struck an unusually bearish note.

“The mood of the group was generally gloomy, but George said we were going into a serious recession,” said Byron Wien, the chief investment strategist of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund.

Mr. Soros hopes his theories will finally win the respect he craves. But, ever the trader, he hedges his bets. “I may well be proven wrong,” he said. “I would say that I’m the boy who cried wolf three times.”

Many of the people Mr. Soros wants to influence may view him with skepticism, in part because of how he made his fortune. In 1992, his fund famously bet against the British pound and helped force the British government to devalue the currency. Five years later, he bet — correctly — that Thailand would be forced to devalue its currency, the baht. The resulting bitterness toward him among Thais was such that Mr. Soros canceled a trip to the country in 2001, fearing for his safety.

Asked if those people are right to blame him, he says, “Well no, not entirely.”

No single investor can move a currency, he said. “Markets move currencies, so what happened with the British pound would have happened whether I was born or not, so therefore I take no responsibility.”

Mr. Soros, came of age in Nazi-occupied Hungary and has for decades longed to write a masterpiece that might put him among thinkers like Hegel or Keynes, said Michael T. Kaufman, who wrote a book about Mr. Soros. “He spent years writing papers and letters to people, but everyone ignored him,” Mr. Kaufman said.

He continues to be one of the top givers to charities around the world, and has given more than $5 billion away through his foundations.

Yet even Mr. Soros acknowledges that many economists still slight his theories.

Several outside investors also left, and Mr. Soros overhauled the company as more of a wealth management tool for his own family and related charities. Mr. Soros said in 2000 that he no longer desired returns like the 30.5 percent his fund returned on average, after management fees, from 1969 to 2000.

In 2004, Mr. Soros tapped his oldest son, Robert, to become the chief investment officer, despite Robert’s reluctance.

At that time, Mr. Soros, was busy trying to turn public opinion against President Bush. He donated $27 million to anti-Bush organizations and traveled the country speaking out against the president. This time around, he is less involved. He endorsed Senator Barack Obama but kept his distance from the campaign trail.

Robert Soros, 44, who once claimed his father based his trades not on grand theories like reflexivity but rather on his back pain, never shared his father’s enthusiasm for the markets. “When you’re a billionaire’s son, you’re less hungry than when you’re a Hungarian immigrant,” one former Soros Fund Management executive said.
Even so, the Soros fund performed well under the younger Soros, and as recently as last June, it was up 10 percent for the year, according to a letter to investors. At the end of July, Robert stepped down from his head investment role, just before his father returned to trading. Robert and his brother Jonathan remain deputy co-chairmen, under their father, the chairman of the fund.

This week, Mr. Wien illustrated the knack of Mr. Soros for timing with an old story. In 1995, Mr. Soros asked Mr. Wien why he bothered going to work every day. Why not go to work only on days when there is something to do?

“I said, ‘George, one of the differences between you and me is you know when those days are, and I don’t,’” Mr. Wien said.

(Bonn, 26 March 2008) – A next round of UN-sponsored global climate change
negotiations - the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2008 - is set to begin in
Bangkok, Thailand on 31 March 2008. These talks will  move forward a set of
decisions called the “Bali Roadmap”, adopted at the UN Climate Change
Conference held in Bali in December 2007.

On the one hand, the Bangkok Climate Change Talks are expected to establish
a clear work programme for a negotiation process on strengthened
international action against climate change, established under the Bali
Roadmap. On the other hand, talks on further commitments for Kyoto Protocol
Parties will include considering the possible tools available to
industrialised countries to reach future emission reductions.

The two processes are set to culminate in a strengthened and effective
international climate change deal, to be clinched at the UN Climate Change
Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

“The challenge is to design a future agreement that will significantly step
up action on adaptation, successfully halt the increase in global emissions
within the next 10-15 years, dramatically cut back emissions by 2050, and
do so in a way that is economically viable and politically equitable
worldwide,” said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UN Climate Change Talks, Bangkok 2008  will take place at the United
Nations Conference Centre (UNCC) of the Economic and Social Commission for
Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and will conclude on 4 April 2008.

Around 1,000 people, including government representatives, participants
from business and industry, environmental organizations and research
institutions are expected to attend. The opening ceremony 31 March will be
attended by the Environment Ministers of Thailand and of Indonesia.
Two working groups meeting in Bangkok:

The Bangkok UN meeting will convene two working groups: the first session
of the “Ad hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the
Convention” (AWG-LCA) and the first part of the fifth session of the “Ad
hoc Working Group on further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the
Kyoto Protocol” (AWG-KP).

The working group under the Convention was agreed in Bali and is designed
to negotiate the Copenhagen agreement. It comprises all 192 Parties to the
UNFCCC. This group will establish its work programme, identify work that
needs to be supported by additional work shops and  establish what input is
needed from the UN System, the business sector, NGOs and others, and how
this will be integrated into the overall work plan.

The working group under the Kyoto Protocol comprises 178 Parties and was
mandated in 2005 to consider future commitments for industrialised Parties
to the treaty. In Bangkok, this group will initiate the second step of its
work programme; in particular, the analysis of possible means available to
developed countries to reach their emission reduction targets.

The Kyoto Protocol AWG will provide an informal setting for input from
experts and for Parties to present their views on the issues related to the
different means, as well as on how to enhance their effectiveness and
contribution to sustainable development. Issues under consideration include
emissions trading and the project based mechanisms, land use, land-use
change and forestry, greenhouse gases, sectors and source categories to be
covered, and possible approaches targeting sectoral emissions.

Media must have prior accreditation from the UN says the UNFCCC material - this means that the New York based UN DPI is being given a veto power on what they consider as legitimate media. If you are a website that wants to publicize ways how the state of the world can be improved - you better not waste your time by trying to cover those events. The UN wants you to go there as NGOs so you do not bother the oil interests and such ministers that want to be saved from the scrutiny of real media. Sure, they do not mind large generalist conventional newsmedia - non professionals when it comes to a specific topic -that send home the essence of the press releases dished out to them. The UN feels that the role of the media is to be an extension of the UN Public Relations office. This will not make for good channels of information - and the only informed people will be those that read the reports by the IISD team that makes available the EARTH NEGOTIATIONS BULLETINs to the participants of the working sessions. Without those Bulletins - even they would be totally in the dark.

About the UNFCCC:
With 192 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol has to date 178 member Parties. Under the Protocol, 37 States, consisting of highly industrialised countries and
countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have legally binding emission limitation and reduction commitments. The ultimate objective of both treaties is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference
with the climate system.

—————————-

www.SustainabiliTank.info finds inacurate the mention by UNFCCC  of “BOTH TREATIES.”

This because of the fact that a Protocol to a treaty - does not become a second treaty. It is only being redefined by such signatories to the treaty that want to wash their hands of the attached protocol - read the US in this case. Does now the UNFCCC Secretariat wishes also to go that way and disown the Kyoto Protocol? This would be like stepping out on thin ice - simply because the road to Copenhagen was laid out on the corpse of the KP. Without this solid base there is no road!  This is not to say that we loved the KP when it was formulated, but since then it became “the only game in to