Don't Shoot the Real Reporters -- The Rise and Fall of Civilization

Two commentaries I've written that tie into all things related to civil society, how we build our culture, what we know, and how we self-govern. It's about news, information, and knowledge based thinking. I had the opportunity to talk to four Russians working in the fields of journalism and media and press relations. That interview was conducted for my KYRS radio show. More on that later. But first, two pieces that relate to media and the press and what is happening in our country, the world.

[Commentary]
Thank a Reporter
Journalists keep an eye on the prize, reporting on humanity’s contextualized struggle

http://www.inlander.com/content/newscommentary_paul_haeder_journalism_and_reporters


[Commentary]
Down for the Count
Newspapers are hurting, but journalism is still crucial

http://www.inlander.com/content/newscommentary_paul_haeder_newspapers_are_dying_journalism_still_important

High Five-ing the Next New Career Thing? Planning's 2010-2019 Future

Two chunks of synopsis writing from Planetizen, and PacifiCAD and the Autodesk software and training tie into the general field of planning, land use, architecture. Planning and urban development are key in our next decade -- for population increases, shifting economics, climate change, energy availability, higher energy costs, and just redesigning cities and the suburbs.

So, go to the year in review and see the planners' web site's top planning news stories of the year. It's a review from a very rarefied field, but one that if practiced right, is holistic, far-ranging and tied into everything that makes culture and society function at the community level and town and city space.

From Planetizen --http://www.planetizen.com/node/42294

Quote:

Over the course of the year, the editors of Planetizen review and post summaries of hundreds of articles, reports, books, studies, and editorials related to planning and urban development. Now, we take a look back at 2009 and the trends and issues that defined the year in urban planning.
The economic recession infiltrated nearly every news story this year, especially in terms of urban planning and development. From the economic stimulus package to the projects it funded, the nation and the rest of the world seemed to spend all of 2009 in recession-reaction mode. And while many of the problems the recession brought are not solved yet, 2009 was a year of adaptation, fresh ideas and some bad old habits. Read the full summaries below to see how these stories played out in 2009.

• The Great Recession
  
• The Shrinking City


• The "Shovel-Ready" Conundrum


• High Speed Rail

Now, let's see how the planning profession fairs in a recent US News and World Report, "top careers of 2010" article. There is a big lack of deep thinking with these articles, and so read the report (and see the other top professions listed) and then eschew the comment response below that I was asked to write.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/42296

Quote

U.S. News and World Report has named urban planning one of its 50 top careers for 2010. Growth in population is cited as a reason for growth in the demand for urban planners.


"An expanding population has created the need for additional transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools in many parts of the country. The urban and regional planning field is expected to grow 19 percent from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Most of the new jobs will be with state and local governments."

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Read that piece, and read the comments as they keep coming in. USNWR predicted the same thing for urban planning as a career LAST year. Read those comments left by students, for the end of 2008 article, and see how graduates and those who have been chronically unemployed in the field reacted.

Below is a commentary I was asked to write for the planning profession. I've cut it back some:

Let's Do Paradigm Shift in the Planning Field --

By Paul Haeder

[all but thesis for masters in Urban and Regional Planning, Eastern WA University]

I can't believe the level of myopia in some of these responses to the Top 50 Careers for 2010, and looking at the ultra-conservative US News and World Report's latest "Urban planner, career of the next year" story is deja vu. Read USNWR's 2008 piece -- same myopia. Then read the responses from the disenfranchised folk with masters degrees and plenty of experience who have hit the proverbial wall. Those people's narratives are a million times more important than anything coming from USNWR and the planning "profession."

The planning field and professions are peopled by business as usual folk, and most planners are happy to be pencil pushers once they get a job. Sure, the pencils are being replaced by GIS and more software tools and a social networking mentality. But remember history -- Trains went 100 miles an hour and were on time in this country in the 1930s. Gosh, now with the complexity of systems and all that planning techno stuff, we have what kind of train system in 2010? And that system that is non-existent? Maybe students need to start protesting, demanding at all levels of society, the so-called market society, that you get those things built. Pry the narrative away from tea baggers, Hollywood, those running Wall Street.

Planners in the field, the so-called movers and shakers, they have failed to come together in their respective communities to pull together other professionals and thinkers and neighborhood leaders to assail the broken governing concept we are stuck in. We need self governance, and planning students need to probably learn how to develop their own community/-ities and coalesce and try and come up with a business plan and open up a community development, community organizing, green think tank, planning consortium. Demand that from your professors, and the overpaid administrators. Stop the pecking order mentality and build community. Stop the top down thinking.

Quit being so conservative. Find an old building somewhere, pool resources, build bunk beds, habitation pods, a community kitchen, pool all those consumer things that make living, recreating and working possible, two hybrid cars for workers and inhabitants, live there, and open up shop. Put your foots down and stop these silly projects the planning and landscape architecture and geography disciplines make you do. Make sure you know how to research, write, access the power brokers, articulate your needs and our great-great-great grandchildren's needs when they are 70 years old, and go to county and city government meetings, rabble rouse, and “out” the planning profession for what it is – sometimes staid, unimaginative, old-school white male/female dominated. The planning leaders need career development specialists, and the field should be expanded in every sector of society. That's their job, not to just get development and land use misuse facilitated by graduates to perpetuate their field.

DO not give up your ideals tied to the huge shifts we will be experiencing in the next 20 years. Population growth, shifting population demographics (how terrible is it that white people in California are calling it Mexi-fornia -- learn the roots of this mind set -- these are lawyers and planning people saying this, and use it an opportunity for community change and building a new California, then); peaking water, perpetual droughts in the SW USA, climate change, more economic hits on the middle class, and a completely dysfunctional two-party system; systemic under and unemployment, more of the kind of He-cession (chronically unemployed young men) we've just gone through; and the huge gutting of the educational system through more crappy privatization --------- OH, these are just a few challenges recent graduates and upcoming planning students face.

More than 29,000 reporting jobs and newspapers were lost or shuttered last year, yet we have more journalism students at colleges and universities than ever -- a 35 percent increase the past ten years. That's one graduate for more than 600 jobs. There are lots of theories about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education, by the professors and professionals into he field, but in one way, this is delusional, showing us how truly dysfunctional our society has become. Denial, delaying and downright stuck in a psychology of pre-investment. And maybe a society that is undergoing ten or twenty years of abused person syndrome.

Start supporting collective bargaining. Unions. Demand livable wages. Demand real housing choices -- beyond anyone's current boxed up dreams. Stop supporting bad development, bad politicians, bad members of your chamber of commerce, the building and cement industries. Speak out and show them you know something, even if you are unemployed or employed outside the planning profession. Protest not just at anti-war demonstrations (though, planning for airports, huge transportation projects, and empire building vis-à-vis military bases and snooping, torture and occupation training camps, those jobs are growing -- so join up and be part of the great green-blue-white DoD machine if you want a planning job), but protest your planning organizations, the schools. Demand planning - community development and organizing -- in all fields. Be careful of those planners out there who actually have very little real college planning background -- they are MBA's, architects, government majors, the business-as-usual folk. Get on the schedules of school activities groups, city councils, and give Power Point process oriented talks on your vision of your community through the eyes of your narratives and planning background.

All those conferences, all those endlessly repetitious seminars (how many sustainability-green-new urbanism conferences have I declined because of carbon footprint issues? Tons, and the profession laughs at that mentality), all the self-congratulating cliques, all of that good old boys and girls networking, for us as planning students and graduates, learn how to derail it, stop it. Why not have committees populated by non-practicing planners, and unemployed students? You think those perspectives are needed?

We are in a huge paradigm shift, not just in planning, but in all levels of civil and market society, and the economic nazis and all those mainstream idiots with WSJ or Newsweek and CNN, FOX, etc., you will fail to anticipate the approaching out of control Hummer bearing down on your bike-loving tail. Many states (My state, Washington) now will feel the trillion dollar heist created by planners, financial ones, and those with Ivy-League educations. The next three years we will have state shortfalls beyond imagination. We can't even get old, experienced senators to introduce a state income tax -- where is their great education foundations, their focus? You have to hit those politicos too in you under- or unemployment. Tuition is rising to the point of only rich kids attending higher education. Additionally, population shifts will spell the demise of schools in the next 20 years. Cities retracting, others growing. These are the issues you need to research and demand to be put through the planning process at school, in market society.

The planning profession and the field as a study need complete overhaul. When I brought the 2009 Urban Planner of the Year article to my graduate planning instructors' attention, they were blasé. Those comments are telling. And maybe the professors just can't deal with real news -- there are more and more unhappy people coming out of planning fields, especially many of those who already have had some slice of the American Dream (pipe dream) and actually wanted to be agents of change and reform in their communities by going back to college and changing professions. Those folk should never be shunted because of the profession's myopia and shortcomings.

Busting Civil Society, Chilling Out the Developing Nations -- Copenhagen Failed

Copenhagen spun by the mainstream press seems oddly successful, or some first step, or something the West tried so hard to work on. That's pure delusion and fabrication. We'll look at the ramifications of the failure of Copenhagen 15 in an upcoming blog. But for now, McKibben and Monbiot, two who have a keen eye on climate change and climate policy, post some remarkable observations.
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Environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben of 350.org voiced his disapproval. Writing for Grist, McKibben summarized what Obama accomplished:

He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there's a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees. But when you get too close to the center of things that count--the fossil fuel that's at the center of our economy--you can forget about it. We're not interested. You're a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves we don't want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for fifty years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America's economy. We already did this with war and peace, and now we've done it with global warming. What exactly is the point of the U.N. now?

He formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters. China, the U.S., and India don't want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse. It is no accident that the targets are weak to nonexistent. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with targets, he said. Indeed. And now imagine what this agreement will look like with the next Republican president.

He demonstrated the kind of firmness and resolve that Americans like to see. It will play well politically at home and that will be the worst part of the deal. Having spurned Europe and the poor countries of the world, he will reap domestic political benefit. George Bush couldn't have done this--the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear. The ice caps won't be the only things we lose with this deal.

McKibben's sentiment was echoed by Britain's leading climate writer, George Monbiot, who wrote:

Even before this new farce began it was starting to look as if it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992.

We have now lost 17 precious years; possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, which has been driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterized, until now, as the good guys: those which have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved to be more urgent concerns than either the natural world or human civilization. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest; it was nice knowing you, not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

The next meeting of parties is scheduled for November 2010 in Mexico City, but it's unclear if a binding agreement will be put in place then. Friday's agreement set a goal of 2015.

Inspired New Cities' Design -- Spokane, Yes We Can, No se Puede?

Copenhagen is huge, and the fallout will be bigger. The media failed, that is, the mainstream media. Americans are a bit behind the curve -- like 20 years. Other smart nations are appalled that USA has so many deniers, delayers and baby-step proponents. There are signs of hope in the USA. Portland, Chicago, heck, Los Angeles.

We'll analyze the major issues behind why Copenhagen failed, how the mainstream media spins it, why our Press allows Sarah Palin pen an editorial in the Washington Post demanding Obama boycott Copenhagen. These are troubling times, a bridge falling apart over troubled waters.

But, again, hope. Here's what Spokane (and the worldwide web) gets today in the form of my weekly/monthly piece, in the Inlander. Autocad's E-Squared series inspired me some to follow up on some of the information in several episodes. Thanks to PacifiCAD for allowing me to work this blog, for hosting it, this past year.

http://www.inlander.com/content/newscommentary_paul_haeder_living_post_carbon_world
A Post-Carbon World
Crawlers, delayers, deniers and baby-steppers need not apply to the future

Paul K. Haeder

Friend of the Earth? Need not Apply at Copenhagen!!

So, now World Wildlife Fund for Nature has been banned from COP15. Friends of the Earth. We wonder how the USA techie world, those involved in businesses and development used to help design a new world that cuts energy use, creates architecture that is possibly carbon net zero, works with innovators looking to Living Buildings and LEED platinum construction, we wonder where they stand on this movement to work toward a global justice movement tied to climate change?

This is what Treehugger has posted on the barring of Friends of the Earth International from the COP 15 meetings that have two days left for complete failure to be declared by all but the politicians who have showed they cannot lead. USA part of the reason for the failure? Canada? Maybe. More on that in a coming blog post:

Civil Society groups are being targeted at COP15 with none being more punished than Friends of the Earth International, which has been banned from the Bella Centre, site of the UN Climate talks. About 50 Friends of the Earth representatives, all with accreditation and secondary badges, have been refused admission to the conference. The group has set up an action alert so you can voice your disapproval to Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCC.

The letter reads:

I'm writing to express my dismay that you have barred the climate conference passes for Friends of the Earth International delegates without their knowledge and without warning.

Friends of the Earth International, along with other NGOs and civil society groups have an important role to play in these UNFCCC climate negotiations.

This often requires the use of peaceful protests at particular points and places during the conference, to highlight the pushing and shoving done by rich nations to get their way at the expense of the developing nations and those most at risk from the impacts of dangerous climate change.
Please make every effort to reinstate Friends of the Earth International, and other NGO and civil society passes, so that the voices of all can be heard at the climate talks, and so that a fair and just deal can be achieved for all.

The world is watching, Mr de Boer.

FOE has been critical of the weak US climate legislation and has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of REDD offsets in a carbon market. The group represents million from around the world. Please take action now.
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This is a call to action made by FOE, not by PacifiCAD, of course.
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Other sites?
http://www.350.org/

100 Countries for 350 and "1.5 to Stay Alive"!

16 December, 2009 - 04:59 — Jamie

We're entering the final days of the climate talks here in Copenhagen. And there's no need to sugar-coat it: the outlook doesn't look good. According to our friends at Climate Interactive, the cumulative result of all the proposals currently on the table would take the world not the 350 ppm that scientists say we need for a habitable planet, but all the way to 770 ppm. As Bill McKibben has been saying, "If that's not literally hell, it will have a similar temperature."

Yet, despite the slim chances of an ambitious agreement here in Copenhagen, we're taking hope from the growing number of countries that now support the 350 target and the call for real solutions to the climate crisis. Today, we got confirmation in a speech by Grenadian President H.E. Tilman Thomas that over 100 countries now support the call for 350ppm and a no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise.

"We must act now, because if we do not, history will not absolve us..." said President Thomas in a powerful speech on behalf of the Association of Small Island States, which 350.org has been working to build support for throughout the talks.

President Thomas' remarks were amplified by a speech just moments later by H.E. Pakalitha Bethuel Mosisili of Lesotho, speaking on behalf of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), who explicitly endorsed the 350ppm target on behalf of the LDC's 49 member states.
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http://climateinteractive.org/
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The so-called "leaked emails" from Climate Change center in England:

A leaked document on climate change is causing furor and driving a wedge between rich and poor countries at the worldwide summit in Copenhagen. Developing nations say that the document asks them to reduce carbon emissions by unfair levels. Former Vice President Al Gore and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon went on the defensive Tuesday, saying that the draft text was only one of many options on the table. We talk with Andrew Revkin, environment reporter for The New York Times and Richie Ahuja, India Program Manager for the Environmental Defense Fund.

http://www.thetakeaway.org/stories/2009/dec/10/gore-ban-defense-after-leaked-danish-text/

Andrew Revkin has done 25 years of environmental reporting, 15 years with the NYT. He's been pushed out, as NYT is cutting a hundred positions.

Climate Talks Are Less Talk, Less Action, More of the Same: Billy Clubs and the Club of the Elite Holding Court?

In a perverse way, climate change has inspired people around the world to make competing claims that they are its first victims. From low-lying Pacific islands like Kiribati and Tuvalu, where people face being literally swallowed by rising seas, to Tibetan farmers in Kashmir's remote Ladakh region, where receding Himalayan glaciers threaten agriculture, people in every corner of the world are coming forward as being on the frontline of global climate change.

Crop failure and drought in Africa, loss of biodiversity in the Amazon and extreme flooding and heat waves in Europe all prove that, if nothing else, climate change is successfully uniting the world in a collective state of imperilment.

Now add to the list Hawaii.

Read the rest at: http://www.truthout.org/1215093

• Climate Change Talks Do Show a Divide Between Rich and Poor Nations
• Censorship Abounds
• Transparency is Lacking
• Police Use Gestapo Tactics to Round Up Scientists, Activists, People in the Know
• Mainstream US Media Miss the Mark on Climate Change Talks COP15
• NPR Barely Contextualizes Anything about Climate Change Action
• Those in the Southern Hemisphere Are Reaping the Immediate Effects of Climate Change -- Droughts, Weird Deluges, Flooding, Crop Failure, Livestock Deaths, No Wheat
• If Bush was in Kindergarten, Obama is in First Grade [on climate policy] -- Environmental change experts proclaims
• Epic Fight Over Words -- 17 percent, 30 percent, 90 percent
• Geo-engineering not the solution to climate change
• Systemic change, not recycling cans and turning off lights
• 1,500 people arrested in Copenhagen
• UN suspended mainstream environmental groups from participating -- Friends of the Earth
• “Politicians talk, leaders act,” read the sign outside the Bella Center in Copenhagen on the opening day of the United Nations climate summit.
• Dr. Charles Fletcher, chair of the UH Geology and Geophysics Department said, "Scientists are not doing a good job of communicating the facts of global warming to policy makers and the public." He was referring to what he called "climate change deniers," particularly in the United States. "You don't see that in other countries," Fletcher said.

Copenhagen 15, the 15th UN Conference on Climate Change, has been a disaster.

And the divide between rich and poor, Northern climes and Southern climes; those with real scientific solutions and those who are deniers, delayers and economic hit men; paradigm shift seekers and ameliorating backpeddlers, elegant solution creators and business as usual types; those who are on the front lines of climate disaster and disruptions of people and economies versus those who seem to think they are insulated from dramatic climate change shifts, this great divide is a chasm widening, metaphorically the huge fissure in an ice field splitting as raging warming arctic waters divide and melt away entire ice sheets while little is done to work as a collective force of 192-plus nations on climate change mitigation.

The groups that see 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 and who see 1.5 C- average global warming as the limit, they are backed by not just science but myriad of people on the ground. From health care workers, to experts in husbandry. Agronomists and hydrologists. People planning the cities of the future. Transportation experts. Engaged youth and educational experts. The Five E's in sustainability -- Equity, Environment, Education, Energy and Economy -- all have been harmonized by the leaders in this movement to stop global catastrophe. The leaders of countries and corporations seem to be disrupting what the people want -- real, serious, committed change to move into a carbon-free society.

Here's another piece from Truthout. More blogs to come on Climate Countdown.

Paul Haeder
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Copenhagen - ‘’Those who run the decision-making on climate change are the same who have caused it,’’ said Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the world’s first international climate hearing on Tuesday, pithily identifying the reason why justice has been elusive at the ongoing climate change summit in the Danish capital.

Climate victims from all over the world were practically trying to scream into the ears of the negotiators at the COP15 that everybody’s lives were at stake unless a fair deal was reached.

Over the past year, more than one and a half million people from 36 countries around the world have participated in national climate hearings, testifying on how climate change has wreaked havoc in their lives and asking for justice.

"This is a case of deep injustice,’’ said the Archbishop who led the hearings on Tuesday along with former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.

The timing of the international hearings could not have been better. Across the corridors in the Bella Centre, negotiators were trying to regroup after Monday’s suspension of negotiations as African countries, backed up by the entire G77 group of 130 developing states, protested against the conduct of the negotiations.Rather than going along a two-track approach preferred by the poorest countries, the negotiations seemed to be following the interests of the developed states.

"We are holding this international climate hearing at a critical moment in the negotiations," said Jeremy Hobbs, the executive director of Oxfam International, which hosted the hearings."

The stories of the climate witnesses should provide the moral imperative for a fair deal in Copenhagen,’’ said Hobbs, with just four days left for governments to reach an agreement.

The reality of the crisis in negotiations loomed large over the hearings as the conflict between the industrialised and the developing world surfaced. And the messages from the climate change witnesses stood out the louder for it.Speaking in the name of his indigenous brothers from Latin America, Caetano Juanca, a farmer from Cuzco, Peru, told the international audience in Copenhagen that his people were suffering without being guilty, and called for an agreement that "respects Pachamama (Mother Earth)."

Pelonesi Alofa from Trinidad and Tobago said that the CoP15 negotiators are "buying and selling’’ the lives of people. "Don’t we understand that climate change is not negotiable?" she asked. "I have now understood that CoP15 is beyond climate change, beyond Tobago."

Constance Okolet from Uganda explained that her people do not know any more when to plant and when to harvest, that they are eating only once a day, and that seasons have disappeared.

"I am here to tell the world leaders that we want our seasons back!" she told the audience.Shorbanu Khatun from Bangladesh, the last to testify, recounted how, as traditional crops failed in her village, her husband was reduced to foraging for food, only to be killed by a wild animal. Later on, her home was destroyed by a cyclone. "At first I thought god was punishing us," she said, "but I have come to understand that it is man-made."

Robinson concluded the hearings by stating that not only were the effects of climate change brought about by the actions of industrialised countries but they were being felt disproportionately by people who cannot be blamed for climate change.

"The failure of industrialised countries to act with urgency is leading us all to social and international disorder," she warned.The people’s fundamental right to "international and social order" (a basic principle in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is denied through the manner in which decisions about how to tackle climate change are being made, she said.

Robinson asked for industrialised countries to commit immediately to 40 percent emissions reductions by 2020 based on 1990 levels and to offer long-term - and additional - funding worth 200 billion US dollars annually until 2020 - half for adaptation and half for mitigation.

"I do not trust the governments of industrialised countries because they are only interested in money and they do not care about Pachamama," Caetano Juanca told TerraViva. "But I trust the people, the work done through churches and communities - there are people who care.’’

Asked what will happen if a fair deal is not signed in Copenhagen, Juanca responded: ‘’We will continue to fight until they listen to us. Our struggle does not stop here."

Copenhagen Facts from WRI

From December 7-18, 2009, the world will convene in Copenhagen, Denmark to create a new global climate agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP-15). WRI's experts have been actively involved in the negotiations leading up to COP-15 and are analyzing various dimensions of a new agreement. Here are our most recent thoughts:

Obama's Copenhagen Visit, Emission-Reduction Target are Good News for Climate

South Africa: An Experiment in Climate Change Adaptation Planning. As South Africa moves forward with its own preparations for climate change, other countries are taking note.

Dispelling Myths About India and Climate Change - Leaders must overcome the mistrust that has characterized recent U.S.-India relations on climate change and energy.

China's State Council Unveils 40-45% Carbon Intensity Target - China's announcement signals its commitment both to the climate conference in Copenhagen, and its intent to achieve significant domestic emissions reductions. Jonathan Lash on China's new carbon intensity target.

Reflections from Barcelona - The Barcelona talks brought into relief the complex mix of politics and policies that countries are grappling with as they attempt to identify clear choices for their leaders.

Online Resources for COP-15

Foundation for a Low Carbon Future: Essential Elements of a Copenhagen Agreement. This brief paper, rooted in WRI's long-running analysis of the complex and interconnected issues under negotiation, identifies key elements for a successful and possible outcome in Copenhagen.

COP-15: Countdown to Copenhagen. Collection of resources for those following the international climate negotiations, including staff contacts and expertise, recent COP-15 stories, publications, charts and maps, and related links.

ChinaFAQs, a project facilitated by WRI, provides insight into critical questions about Chinese policy and action on energy and climate change. ChinaFAQs is a portal to policy-relevant data and analysis informed by a network of leading U.S. research institutions, business groups, and civil society.

@WorldResources on Twitter - follow @worldresources for regular news and information updates about the COP-15 negotiations. You can also subscribe to the @worldresources twitter list of UNFCCC-IPCC-COP tweeple.

Today's environmental challenges are complex and global in nature. They call for visionary and ambitious action grounded in sound science and objective analysis -- the kind of action that has distinguished WRI's record of effectiveness for over 25 years.