This past week, my master’s project team attended the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar. By most accounts, the week was a huge success. We presented a poster at Forest Day, represented Michigan at our booth, made scores of professional connections, and were praised by one organization as being “the most employable people at the conference”—a compliment that went immediately to our heads and into the “W” column against Yale and Duke. I left the conference feeling invigorated, with a stack of business cards in my suitcase and (offset) carbon in my wake. It wasn’t until after I arrived back in Ann Arbor on December 3rd and went for a run outside in shorts and a tank top that I realized our metrics of ”˜success’ for attending the conference might have been a bit distorted.
We have arrived in Doha, Qatar—a city rising from the desert and, rather ironically, from oil revenue—for the 18th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP18). While expectations for an international climate change agreement are tempered this COP, 2012 is significant in that two of the negotiating tracts—the Kyoto (KP) Track for signatories of that protocol and the Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) Track for developed countries taking “mitigation actions” outside of Kyoto—are expected to close this year.