Loko Dadacha photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

Many unforgettable images come to mind when I think of my trip to Ethiopia earlier this year, but I especially like this portrait of Loko Dadacha, one of the most extraordinary people I met during my visit. You can really sense the great strength–physical and emotional–of this widow and mother of six from Gutu Dobi, Ethiopia, who is helping to lead her community during a time of ongoing drought.

Saving circle, Mali. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Women from the Banakoro, Mali, village Saving for Change group–dubbed Sabougnuma, or “good deed”–hold their weekly meeting. I like how this colorful photo really captures the community spirit of the savings groups, where women work together to help each other save money and start small businesses.

Shorbanu Khatun photo by Oxfam

The power of speaking out comes through in this image of Shorbanu Khatun, one of Oxfam’s “climate witnesses,” who testified before world leaders at the Copenhagen UN talks about the effects of climate change on her community in Bangladesh.

Human Countdown photo by Kate Vacanti / Oxfam America

And a different kind of speaking out comes through in Kate Vacanti’s photos of Oxfam’s Human Countdown event in September in New York City, when over 1,000 people turned out in Central Park to call for climate justice. Whenever I look at this photo I remember the energy in the air that day, and the amazing feeling of all these different people coming together for the same reason.

What photos–Oxfam or otherwise–inspired you this year? Share your selections in the comments field.

Over the past 18 years of international climate talks, the United Nations process has become hidden behind a wall of impenetrable jargon, as well as the often bewildering behavior of professional diplomats.

This is why the “Adopt-a-Negotiator” program sponsored 13 “trackers” over the past year from as many countries — including Brazil, Canada, China, India, and the United States — to follow the key national delegations, and then report back about their positions and actions during climate treaty meetings.

President Obama and Ben discuss the menu of options before negotiators at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Photo courtesy the Adopt-a-Negotiator program.

“We try to serve as a portal, to convey what our negotiators are doing in the talks to concerned citizenry back home,” US tracker Ben Jervey told me.

I caught up with Ben, a 30-year-old environmental writer and editor from Brooklyn, NY, for a brief interview about how and why he tracks the U.S. delegation. We talked on December 18, during what turned out to be the ultimate evening of the Copenhagen talks.

(Full disclosure: Ben and I both write for New York-based OnEarth Magazine. Ben was working on the night of this interview out of the Fresh Air Centre in central Copenhagen, a non-profit media center that sponsored me for my U.N. press credential. [[Thank you.]] And several years ago I was editor to Ben’s contributor for the now-defunct blog Worldchanging NYC. )

Emily Gertz: What, exactly, do the negotiator trackers do?

Ben Jervey: Our job is to really follow these talks, from the June talks in Bonn, through Bangkok, Barcelona, and now here in Copenhagen.

We attend the meetings, we get to know our negotiators. We help communicate back to the civil society base at home [on] where our countries respective positions stand.

EG: What has that meant on the ground here in Copenhagen?

BJ: How that works practically is, I spend a lot of time following the statements and comments and interventions of Jonathan Pershing, the lead negotiator for the United States.

He used to work at World Resources Institute, and interestingly was one of the lead authors of the very chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that famously declared that developed nations needed to cut their emissions 25-40 percent by 2020. Something that the position that he’s pushing here in Copenhagen falls far short of. So there is a difficult paradox there.

EG: What is a typical day for a negotiator tracker?

BJ: A typical day, you come to the Bella Center, the conference center, pick up the morning program, and try to figure out which meetings are going to be important.

You’ll sit in a plenary or a contact group meeting, wait for the US to speak up, or for anything to be said that would affect the US position. Go to the press briefings and the NGO briefings. Try to get some time in the hallway with key members of the State Department’s delegation, and try to gather whatever sort of intelligence we can.

And at the end of the day, try to write it up into something that makes sense to normal people who don’t speak this UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] language.

EG: Is the delegation aware it’s being tracked?

BJ: Yes, absolutely. I have a pretty transparent and open relationship with the delegation, and they’re aware of my project. I know that they check it out. I’m not sure if Pershing checks it every day, with his [New York] Times headlines, but there are people in the delegation who have made a lot of comments on it.

They might actually use it as some sort of barometer of civil society opinion, and where the concerned, activist advocate space might stand.

EG: How has tracking affected the work of the negotiators?

BJ: I’ve got to be honest and say I don’t think it affects the negotiators very much. They are under pretty clear mandates from the State Department; I think the position that they’re supposed to be negotiating around is set pretty firmly.

And as we’ve seen in the past several days, most of the stickiest issues in these talks are above the level of State Department negotiators. The crucial tripping points that we haven’t solved, those are heads-of-state decisions.

By all accounts the negotiators themselves don’t have a lot to do today. [Because Friday was the day the heads-of-state took over the negotiations among themselves. -- Emily]

EG: So if the reality is that tracking doesn’t have a big impact on what the negotiators do, what’s the goal?

BJ: I would really like people back home who care about climate change, or consider themselves climate change advocates, to better understand what’s happening here.

If you look at the average US climate activist, they wouldn’t really have a sense of what the US position is here. We’re trying to give them that information.

EG: So you’ve gotten to know the people on the delegation. Does that provide you with inside information as things happen?

BJ: They speak very candidly with me. If there’s any real type of inside access information, I can get a head’s up to what meeting might be really important that day.

EG: Have you gotten paid to do this?

BJ: It has technically been a volunteer gig. We have been flown here and put up, and have a per diem. And the access is enormously valuable, obviously.

EG: You’ve had to take a lot of time out from making money, and your personal life. Has it been worth it?

BJ: Yeah, definitely. It was a conscious decision. I felt the need to be more directly involved with this process. Considering the potential importance of these Copenhagen meetings, I was willing to sacrifice to work on it.

EG: It’s safe to assume that whatever comes out of here is going to require another meeting next year, maybe more than one. Will you continue to participate as a tracker?

BJ: To be determined. The fate of the TckTckTck campaign and the GCCA [Global Campaign for Climate Action] at large is all up in the air right now, as is this tracker program.

We had certainly hoped that this would be the end game. But I don’t think anyone was so naive as to think the battle would be completely over.

So we will circle back with each other in January, and figure out where we go from there.

The framework unveiled in Copenhagen today pulled us back from the brink, said international organization Oxfam America.

David Waskow, climate change program director for Oxfam America, said:

“This political agreement must be the floor and not the ceiling. We must now urgently get back to the table and finally make the hard decisions needed to deliver a fair, ambitious and binding climate deal.”

“Millions of people in the US and around the world have mobilized for climate action. Their hopes must drive this process.”

“The US and other countries made progress by saying that financing for developing countries to weather climate impacts and adopt low-carbon development should be $100 billion a year. But it is still unclear how this money will be generated and delivered to the most vulnerable people.”

Emily Gertz is a freelance journalist, editor, and blogger covering the environment, technology, science, and sustainability. She reported on the Copenhagen climate talks on behalf of Oxfam America.

People are looking weary around the conference center at 9:00 pm, but the mood feels pretty even. I think the reason is that if the heads of state are still confabbing, which they are, it means that the 2009 climate talks have yet to crash and burn completely.

In the main hall, I caught sight of youth activist Christina Ora, from the Solomon Islands, being interviewed for TV.  My very first report here from Copenhagen, the weekend before the climate talks began, covered my conversation with Ora at Council of Youth.

Ora is still energetic and articulate two weeks later, despite knowing that the deal likely to emerge here won’t meet the key demand of small island nations.  The small island countries want the industrialized nations to hold mean global temperature growth below 1.5 degrees Centigrade by 2010, a level more likely to stave off catastrophic sea level rise, instead of the 2 degrees C target that they’ve established over the course of this year.

It’s not clear that this number will make it into the final draft of the “Copenhagen accord.”

Ora described to me what she’s been doing at the climate talks, how she feels now, and what she plans to do next.  She’s not giving up on attaining climate justice: the preservation of her home, and help with adapting to the inescapable impacts of global warming.

Ora has a message for “the top people with the power,” the negotiators, ambassadors, and heads of state carving out a new climate treaty:

“If you happen to be reading or hearing this, we wish for you to listen to the voice of Pacific Islanders,  to listen to the vulnerable countries. Because in your hands, you hold our future, our life.”

About President Obama, still present in the building at this writing, Ora said that if he happened to walk by, she’d try to get him to stop and sit with her for a cup of coffee.  I’m sure that even with the rock star president, teenage Ora would bring her impressively well-spoken self to bear and give Obama something to think about during the remainder of these negotiations.

Photo: Ainhoa Goma/Oxfam International

Last night the Oxfam “big heads” (last seen playing football at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh) arrived on the scene in Copenhagen to remind world leaders of the importance of negotiating a fair, ambitious, and binding global deal.

Check out the photo slideshow below:

We at Oxfam have joined the world in waiting for an agreed upon outcome to be announced today in Copenhagen. It’s possible that negotiators will need to stay through the weekend to hammer out the details based on what heads of state agree upon today.

Today’s meetings between heads of state are unprecedented. Few of us can remember a time when world leaders were called in to the negotiating table without a deal already having been struck. In fact, the Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva voiced his frustration in being called in to negotiating sessions that ended past 2:00 am last night and noted that it reminded him of his early years as a trade union negotiator. It’s not all that often that heads of state get pulled into such mayhem.

Much of the focus continues to be on the US and China as President Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao work through some of the remaining issues regarding emissions reduction commitments, the transparency of reporting, and finance.

The positive sign is that so many world leaders (more than 110) have come together in Copenhagen to tackle the issue of climate change. Regardless of the agreed upon outcome in Copenhagen, there’s global momentum at the highest levels to help propel us towards a fair, ambitious, and binding outcome. 

Constance Okollet, from Uganda, and Sharon Hanshaw, from the US, bonded this week at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Photo by Emily Gertz.

Emily Gertz is a freelance journalist, editor, and blogger covering the environment, technology, science, and sustainability. She reported on the Copenhagen climate talks on behalf of Oxfam America.

When Sharon Hanshaw walks into the lobby of the Hotel Copenhagen, Constance Okollet’s face breaks into an enormous smile. In a minute she is standing up from the sofa to fold Hanshaw into an enormous hug.

Soon they are sitting on the couch with their heads together, Okollet’s wiry black hair touching Hanshaw’s bright blond bangs. They trade news of their families and homes, and then move on to strategizing about how Okollet might do fundraising for the community organizing group she founded, the Osukura United Women Network.

Okollet is a farmer from the rural Tororo district in eastern Uganda. Hanshaw is a cosmetologist from East Biloxi, Mississippi. The two women have become close friends while traveling long distances to bear witness to the devastating impacts of climate change on their communities.

While talking on the couch, Okollet gets a call on her mobile from her husband, back home in Uganda. She passes the phone to Hanshaw, who jokes with him like she’s known the couple forever. In her Mississippi drawl, she offers to send him a package of her signature confection, homemade pralines.

Watching them laugh and joke together with so much fun and affection, it’s surprising to learn that the two women met only a few months ago, in New York City. They came in September 2009 for the United Nations Climate Summit, to make the case for funding to help poor nations adapt to climate change. Hanshaw is the first “climate witness” in this program who is from a rich, industrialized nation.

A lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she speaks easily about racial and class prejudice, and the unique position she is in to bust some stereotypes.

“Everybody feels that they’re so rich in America, they can’t have poverty. They can’t have poor people,” she told me. But the reality of class in America is that “my uncle is rich, but he didn’t give me the money,” she says.

As both an American and an African American, she perceives that her presence can be challenging to many of the people she meets as a climate witness, both in the United States and abroad.

“What I need people to understand [is that] we have people who are outside. And I feel that outside is outside,” says Hanshaw. “You outside in the U.S., you outside in Africa, you outside in Uganda — you still outside.”

“I just want people to really understand that…poor is poor in any language, in any country, and be fair to all parties.”

Hanshaw’s story shows just how little climate change respects borders, as well as race or class. As described in Hanshaw’s bio on the Oxfam America web site,

Hanshaw was out of town on August 29, 2005, when Katrina’s winds drove the Gulf of Mexico into her neighborhood. Thirteen feet of water crashed through the streets that day, filling her house with mud, scattering her belongings, tearing the bumper off her car. The waters swept inland to downtown Biloxi, flooding the hairdressing business she’d run for 21 years.

Over four years later, the neighborhood is still struggling to rebuild. The challenges include the relatively low income of its residents, the scope of damage from Katrina, and also the might of Mississippi’s gambling industry, which had its own uses for the land populated by coastal neighborhoods like East Biloxi:  Months after Katrina hit, Hanshaw’s block was bulldozed and replaced with a parking lot for the nearby Imperial Palace casino.

Further, aid dollars intended to help people rebuild homes and small businesses in Gulf Coast Mississippi have been diverted to the casino industry, and to finance an enormous expansion of the state-owned port at Gulfport.

Despite all this, Hanshaw believes that communities hurt by climate change can help each other re-organize and survive. “They say Katrina, I say, tsunami,” she says, speaking of a trip to meet women in India whose lives and communities were disrupted by 2004′s catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami. She met people living in temporary dwellings made from a material containing asbestos.  That was form of “aid,” in her mind, to the trailers contaminated with formaldehyde that FEMA gave to Gulf Coast residents after Katrina.

“The people who got hurt the worst, get hurt the worst again,” she said.

Over four years after Hurricane Katrina, Hanshaw still cries when she talks about losing her neighborhood, about how hopeless she and her friends and family have sometimes felt.  ”I cannot control my emotions when I think about my children, and my house, and my family and my community gone. It just comes,” she says. “I just have to be real with what’s going on. And what’s real is that it hurts.”

Hanshaw harnessed her pain and her hope by helping to found Coastal Women for Change in mid-2006, and then becoming its executive director. As described in a November 2009 profile of Hanshaw in Yes! Magazine (which dubs her a “climate hero”),

“…the group has started programs to help the community and local economy recover, including child care for working women and computer training programs for seniors. And they are working to help residents respond to future disasters by providing emergency preparedness training. More than anything, however, the group’s mission is to empower residents to take part in their local government. CWC members have won seats on the mayor’s planning commission, and the group has organized public forums on federal emergency management, education, affordable housing, and how to elevate the voices of poor and minority communities in the wake of an event like Katrina.”

Hanshaw faced a setback in Copenhagen: Expecting to join fellow climate witnesses and tell her story at an Oxfam “climate verdict” hearing at the conference center, she instead got stuck on one of the appallingly long registration lines that have plagued conference-goers at Copenhagen’s semi-surburan Bella Center, the site of the talks. Oxfam’s Judy Beals filmed a short hand-held video of Hanshaw as they waited in line:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stuck outside in the cold for six hours, Hanshaw missed the hearing, and with it the chance to talk personally, however briefly, with prominent human rights and climate advocates like Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, and Yvo de Boer, as well as to present a united front with her fellow witnesses at these highly charged negotiations. It was clearly an enormous disappointment.

By the time I met up with her a day later, Hanshaw was bouncing back, however.  She was taking on a packed interview schedule with all sorts of journalists — from a reporter connecting up via online telephony, to me with my computer and digital recorder, to the Stupid TV camera crew that caused her to cry once again as she described what she’s lost to global warming.

Hanshaw always has the bigger picture firmly in front of her, and seems to be a natural optimist. The proof is that she has managed to carve some meaning out of the registration debacle:

“I hope that the takeaway is that this is so powerful that people from all over the world came, and were willing to stand in a line indefinitely, because of it,” she told the TV interviewer. “People do believe in climate change.

“This told me, oh, this is not just a haphazardly thing. People really believe in it. I mean, scientists are here. Environmentalists are here. Activists are here. Grassroots people are here. People who went through all types of devastations: fires, typhoons, tsunamis, droughts.

“They’re here to say, ‘Look what’s happened to my land. Look what’s happening to us. How can you feel okay and your neighbor in Peru…in Bangladesh, is suffering? It’s not just. We should be connected through climate change.’”

Earlier today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen and announced in a speech that the US is willing to commit to a collective fund of $100 billion per year by 2020 to support efforts to help poor countries build up their resilience and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Oxfam is making an ice wall sculpture (featuring Pres. Obama's face) to deliver a message to the administration. Photo by Rully Prayoga/Oxfam International.

Clinton said the majority of these funds would be spent on adaptation and forests in developing countries.

“I am deeply concerned about the consequences for developing countries — from Bangladesh to the Maldives, from the Caribbean to West Africa and the Pacific Islands — if we cannot secure the kind of strong operational accord I’ve described today, we know what the consequences will be for the farmer in Bangladesh or the herder in Africa or the family being battered by hurricanes in Central America,” Clinton said. “Without that accord, there won’t be the kind of joint global action from all of the major economies we all want to see, and the effects in the developing world could be catastrophic.  We know what will happen.  Rising seas, lost farmland, drought and so much else.  Without the accord, the opportunity to mobilize significant resources to assist developing countries with mitigation and adaptation will be lost.”

This is a huge win for Oxfam America as we have been in the lead in pushing the Obama administration to commit to a long-term finance number. We, of course, are only part of the puzzle; developing countries themselves have made this a key issue during the negotiations and our allies have carried the message as well. But we shouldn’t underestimate our role – and that of our supporters — in making this a key issue to unlock the negotiations. This also shows how much the US administration wants to get a strong deal out of Copenhagen.

(From left to right) Desmond Tutu, Jeremy Hobbs and Constance Okollet (a Ugandan farmer) at Oxfam's Climate Hearing at the COP15 meeting. Photo by: Jens Astrup/Oxfam International.

This is the signal the world needed that the US is willing to step up.

Clinton’s announcement — though lacking some detail about just how much the US would contribute to the $100 billion number, and how much would be generated from public (government funded) and private money, or come from existing aid commitments — seemed to invigorate negotiators.

“Hold tight and mind the doors. The cable car is moving again,” U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer Boer said moments after Clinton’s announcement, according to a Climatewire story by Lisa Friedman and Darren Samuelsohn.

In our work with developing countries, it has become clear that a US commitment to long-term finance will be key to securing a deal that vulnerable developing countries can agree to. We have been delivering that message to US officials through advocacy and through mobilizing the voices of our constituents. So this is a huge moment for the supporters of Oxfam who have made their voices heard on the human face of climate change. We now have 24 hours to go to secure a deal and move Copenhagen towards a fair and equitable conclusion.

The woman with a baby once had distinct facial features. Photo by Ainhoa Goma/Oxfam International.

Her face has since melted away. Photo by Emily Gertz.

What once were detailed depictions are now shapeless blocks of ice. As they wane away, the sculptures  serve as a powerful reminder to negotiators — who must  move fast during the remainder of this week if they want to help poor communities survive climate change.

Those details are barely visible now. Photo by Emily Gertz.

The warrior once had a detailed staff and necklace. Photo by Ainhoa Goma/Oxfam International

Emily Gertz is a freelance journalist, editor, and blogger covering the environment, technology, science, and sustainability. She reported on the Copenhagen climate talks on behalf of Oxfam America.

Today Oxfam and tcktcktck held a climate hearing at the Copenhagen climate treaty talks, featuring the testimonies of four of the witnesses who described experiencing devastating impacts from fast-changing weather and environmental conditions in their home regions: Constance Okollet of Uganda, Shorbanu Khatun of Bangladesh, Cayetano Huanca of Peru, and Pelenise Alofa of Tuvalu and Kirabati.

Human rights advocate and former Irish president Mary Robinson, Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs also spoke.  I’ve included a section of Tutu’s speech in the slide show, above.

Tutu called on the world to listen to the voices of the climate witnesses.  He lauded the audience for doing so much to bring about action on global warming (leading to some uncomfortable squirming here and there at the perhaps-unearned praise, it seemed to me).

Tutu also spoke of maintaining hope despite the bleak outlook for the talks thus far, saying that it was remarkable how many people had spoken up worldwide to get action on global warming, as well as financial assistance for those already feeling its impacts.  Tutu noted that many of the hundreds of thousands who marched around the world last Saturday had yet to experience such changes themselves.  There was remarkable goodness in them, he said.

“ I have been told to communicate approval for you from celestial corners,” he said, earning chuckles from the packed room.  ”You are putting a smile on God’s face, a face that is often contorted by tears.”

Each witness spoke with a passion that seemed to affect everyone in the room, about the losses they have faced from unprecedented storms, droughts, illnesses, crop and livestock failures, loss of fresh water, as well as the stresses these conditions have brought to their communities.

“I’m looking for leaders, leaders who will stand up and not be bought or sold,” said  Pelenise Alofa of the small Pacific island nation of Kirabati, charging that the Copenhagen climate meeting “is buying and selling, by buying and selling the rights of other people.”

When she called on the room to stand up and clap for Kirabati’s survival, the entire room stood right up to applaud – even the journalists who sat around me, a crowd that prides itself on being unmoved and unmovable.

After the hearing, Mary Robinson delivered their testimonies to Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN climate program in a photo-op event, and de Boer met and briefly spoke with each of the  witnesses.  Though it was hard to tell from my vantage point, Robinson and de Boer seemed to carry on a reasonably substantial conversation about the testimonies, despite the crush of reporters from all sorts of global media pressing in around them.

It was one of the more dramatic press events I’ve witnessed here at the Copenhagen talks.  Reporters were as eager to talk with and photograph Okollet, Huanca Khatun and Alofa, as well as to get star shots of internationally known figures like de Boer and Robinson — increasing the chances that their stories will indeed reach a worldwide audience beyond the worlds of human rights and climate change activism.