kyoto-protocol

- I’m in Qatar, a place slightly smaller than Connecticut, prosaically described in my travel guide app as “mainly flat and barren desert, covered with loose sand and gravel”. There’s not a lot of desert left in its capital, Doha, just a vast sea of choked-up highways (serious SUV traffic!) and low-rise buildings punctuated by monumentalist skyscrapers, all thanks to huge natural gas resources. Pity we're going to have to leave a large part of that gas in the ground if we're going to avoid catastrophic climate change.

As the Cancun sun sets .... Russia helps sink Kyoto / UK Climate Change Committee a hit / Climate Finance Fund gets up / China’s low carbon Five Year Plan ... see below.

1. The UK Climate Change Committee (a statutory body under their Climate Action Bill) was popular amongst Cancun NGOs this week with its call for 60% emission cuts in the UK by 2030 and 50% by 2025. One NGO newsheet called it a “ray of sunshine”.

Friends: I'm at the COP16 Conference in Cancun, aiming to talk about climate bonds as a mechanism to divert private investment to building a low-carbon economy. Here are six snippets from my first 24 hours:

The London-based Climate Bonds Initiative today announced that Graciela Chichilnisky, Professor of Mathematics and Economics and Columbia University in New York, would be joining their international Advisory Panel.