Green World Cup stops Bonn talks

They weren’t dancing the “waka waka” but on Friday, global soccer mania stalled talks to save the planet from overheating.

Updated on: Jun 12, 2010, 24:19:43 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Bonn

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

They weren’t dancing the “waka waka” but on Friday, global soccer mania stalled talks to save the planet from overheating.

Bickering negotiators from more than 190 countries ended their squabbling early to watch the World Cup kickoff between host South Africa and Mexico.

Both countries are also linked to global climate negotiations: Mexico will host the global climate summit in December and South Africa is the venue next year. So, soccer metaphors were rife in Bonn.

“Today’s match can set the pace for the climate talks,” said the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature's South African campaigner Tanseem Essop, wearing her country’s world cup jersey. “We can make progress at COP 16 (in Mexico) so that we can score the winning goal at COP 17 (in South Africa).”

Even though climate talks are stalled over who will pay the multi-billion-dollar bill to mitigate the effects of global warming, the World Cup has been influenced by the message of greener, cleaner world.

Five new stadia are solar powered, and one of them has a rain water harvesting system. Cape Town and Durban, both game venues, are using energy from wind and biogas from landfill sites.

Soccer appeared to be the buzzword in Bonn with speakers telling climate negotiators that the earth will score a “goal of destruction” if they failed to act.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Get the latest headlines from US news and global updates from Pakistan, Nepal, UK, Bangladesh, Russia and US Iran war Live, get all the latest headlines in one place on Hindustan Times.