Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, is to host an alternative climate conference in the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate summit. Morales called the Copenhagen summit "a triumph of the people" as "the presidents came, proposed and went without hearing, but this time they could not impose their declaration." Bolivia was one of a group of nations that blocked a consensus on the Copenhagen Accord, objecting to the deal being done in secret by a small group of nations.

The First World Conference of the People on Climate Change will include indigenous peoples, social movements, environmentalists and scientists as well as governments "who want to work with their people." It will be held in Cochabamba in April. The main aim of the conference is to analyse the structural and systemic causes of climate change and to propose further measures to enhance harmony between humanity and nature. It will exert pressure on the richer nations to accept that they have a "climate debt" to poor countries and will work toward an international court on environmental crimes, the Climate Justice Tribunal. The meeting will also consider a "universal proposal for the rights of mother earth" and technology transfer.

The areas most impacted by climate change in the United States will be "communities-of-color, indigenous peoples, and low-income communities that are socio-economically disadvantaged, disproportionately burdened by poor environmental quality, and least able to adapt. They will be the first to experience extreme heat events, respiratory illness, vector-borne infectious diseases, food insecurity, and natural disasters," write Peggy M Shepard and Cecil Corbin-Mark of West Harlem Environmental Action in a guest editorial special issue of the journal Environmental Justice devoted to the topic of climate justice.

Elsewhere in the special issue, J Timmons Roberts, director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University, argues that the global community needs to get to work swiftly in developing, testing and improving distribution systems for funding to assist developing nations adapt to climate change. "Handing piles of money to corrupt governments without mechanisms to fairly distribute them, and to transparently track them, seems a recipe for foreclosing any chance at addressing international climate justice with real compensation," he comments. Roberts calls on the international community to consider how the allocation of adaptation funding can incorporate national issues such as democratic and participatory governance, transparency and effectiveness of governments in such efforts. He raises the question of where governance and funding are best located at the regional, national or local levels. What institutional arrangements will be required for varied forms of adaptation funding, he asks.

In the United States, Republican senator John Barrasso has called for hearings on the use of intelligence satellites for collecting data on climate change. Collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and climate scientists is weakening the focus on preventing terrorism, he claimed, saying that "the CIA’s resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves – not polar bears on icebergs."

The CIA recently set up a centre on climate change and national security. "This effort draws on imagery and other information that is collected in any event, assisting the United States scientific community without a large commitment of resources," the agency said. Data from the intelligence community has already been posted online in the Global Fiducials Library, where sea-ice imagery from six sites in the Arctic Circle is publicly available. Ice imagery is now being released that will also enable researchers to follow particular ice floes as they drift through the Arctic Ocean. For this summer, Norbert Untersteiner of the University of Washington has asked that the intelligence agencies start the monitoring process sooner, "so we still see the snow cover, maybe in early May."