How many old cell phone chargers do you have at home? Aren't they everywhere but never (hello Murphy) where you need them? The International Telecommunication Union just succeeded in setting a standard for cell phone chargers said ITU's Secretary General Hamadoun Touré, today at a panel organized by Green Cross International.

So, as of next year, every charger will be good to change any phone. Now that's good news.

You might, however,  be surprised what this piece of information has to do with climate change. A lot. Touré, who is also an ally in our campaign for climate justice, estimates that the production of cell phone chargers amounts to as much as 13 Million tons of carbon a year. From now on, if you buy a new cell phone, it will come without a charger as you can go on using your old one. Clever, isn't it? Less clutter, better climate.

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if you want to know what is currently going on at COP 15, oneclimate.net is a great resource. Check it out.

We have been standing in the cold for hours. NGO people, government officials, secretariat staff - all united in the freezing cold. As people got impatient and nervous they started pushing forward, the police pushed back, things became tense. As somebody got pushed from behind, he angrily turned around and stated "I'm a minister, don't push me!". The pusher replied in an instant "I'm a minister, too". Everybody around burst out in laughter, police included. Sometimes a bit of vomical relief does wonders...

There was an almost physical tension around Bela center this morning. As most of civil society is not admitted to the negotiations, many waited for hours in the cold, getting increasingly frustrated.

Copenhagen has become more than an intergovernmental negotiation. As a result of the advocacy work done by civil society, scientists, activists, religious groups more and more people understand the vital importance of these negotiations. I did see at the last COP in Poznan activists with posters saying "the world is watching" and I wished, it would have been the case. But now, the world does watch. And there is an understanding now of the deep inequalitites around climate justice and the need to get climate justice as a leading principle into the negotiation text. This is good news indeed.

Negotiators need to understand the public expectation to deliver. And they need to understand the desire of peolple to be represented in these potentially game changing negotiations. Clearly, there is a danger that...

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The folks at Google Earth have been working very hard (thank you Amy and Karen!) to integrate tons of data into an amazing tour on Google Earth. See, what climate change means to millions of people on the basis of satellite imagery and animation.

Global Humanitarian Forum's President Kofi Annan takes you as the narrator on a journey around the world focussed on our core advocacy work on the human face of climate change.

Don't miss it!

Today, i had the privilege to attend a presentation on the Sahara Desert Project, a project which really might be game changer. Imagine greenhouses in the dessert in which vaporated seawater create a cool and humid atmosphere in which vegetables grow and a surplus of drinking water is generated. The used filters, saturated with salt could be used as building blocks. Sounds like science fiction? These people are serious about it.

In my view, this would be a very concrete action to make climate justice work.

Oneclimate.net is delivering coverage and interviews from COP15 live and on demand. Jose Maria Figueres just did an interview live with Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of Greenpeace and myself on the human impact of climte change and what it means to the ongoing negotiations. An edited version will be on oneclimate.net later today.

Global Humanitarian Forum Board Members Rajendra Pachauri honored today together with Mary Robinson (also a member of our board) and Kumi Naidoo, heading our partner in tcktcktck campaign, the 15 winners of the earth journalism award.

 

Asked on stage whether he would embrace 1.5 degrees warming as the acceptable maximum, the nobel peace laureate stated that, as chairman of IPCC, he could not officially embrace it. But as an individual, he has "a soul" and would certainly endorse 1.5 degrees and the 350ppm as a tool to stay below 1.5 degrees.

 

Indeed, two degrees is far from beeing a "safe" level. As we have seen in our study "anatomy of a silent crisis", millions are already suffering today at a level of warming of less than 0.8 centigrade. More warming will mean more suffering, it is really as simple as that. This...

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Just some 1,5 years ago, we hosted the first Global Humanitarian Forum entitled "The Human Face of Climate Change". At the time, climate change was largely regarded as an enivronmental, future and distant problem. The iconic picture was the little ice bear on a piece of melting ice. So our President and board felt that we need to put human beings in the center of attention as climate change unfolds to become the biggest humanitarian crisis of our times. At the Forum08 our participants and members of the foundation board made very clear that climate change is already impacting on the world's poorest and that it is a matter of justice to dramatically reduce our emissions and support the most vulnerable to build resilienece and develop in a sustainable way.  This is what the Global Humanitarian Forum has been lobbying for since then.

 

At the impressive march to the conference center tonight, I've seen dozens of banners from our campaign partners and other groups asking for climate changes and support...

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Michael Zammit Cutajar, chair of the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action, presented today a new document that brought down the negotiations text from 160 to just over six pages.

This was universally applauded here in Copenhagen as it now forces negotiators to focus on the key questions.The group with the complicated one is the "non-Kyoto group - the one in which the USA are participating.