Cara and Marie Lauré are 2 of the Climate College ambassadors committed to protecting the environment. They would love the atmosphere here in Bonn at the moment.
Bonn is “abuzz” with environmental experts and activists at the moment. Today was the start of “COP 9”, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
This is the nature protection event of the year. “One Nature. One World. Our Future” – that’s the motto.
CBD website
They’re expecting around 7,000 people from around the world. The event goes over 2 weeks. Next week, the ministers and heads-of-state will arrive for the “high-level” segment. You might ask yourself whether involving that many people in a conference is really good for the environment. Of course that also means me as one of the 500 (!) journalists accredited for the event. My ecological footprint isn’t deep for this one, as the conference is literally 2 tram stops away from our headquarters here at DW. I’m not sure whether the numbers don’t get inflated in general though. But I do think we need to do something, and if that means getting all these people around the table – then, so be it.
The German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the conference, with Ahmed Djoghlaf, who’s the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. They both stressed the link between biodiversity and climate, which is why Bonn is a great city to have it, as it’s home to the UNFCCC (Yes, there really are 3 “C”s), the Climate Secretariat.
Homepage for the UN climate experts
There is a live webcast of the conference, if you’re in to that sort of thing.(You’ll find it under the link above).
I went along today with my colleague Nina Haase. We’ll be reporting on what’s happening on Living Planet and other programmes over the next 2 weeks.
On the way there, I (almost literally) ran into a Greenpeace kids’ demo. They were singing their own German version of “Frère Jacques” adressed to the German Environment Minister. It goes like this:
“Sigmar Gabriel, Sigmar Gabriel, are you sleeping?
Can’t you hear the polar bears, Can’t you hear the polar bears: “Save the Climate”.
It’s great to see young school kids, with their faces painted and hand-made banners with tigers and polar bears on them being active for the environment.
You can listen to them singing below.
Thanks to teachers like Isobel who have responded to this blog. Isobel wants to use it to teach her pupils about climate change and related issues. She finds they show a lot of interest in these issues. More power to you Isobel and everyone reading this who’s working to get the next generation involved in protecting biodiversity, combatting climate change, and making sure they have a future.

Yesterday I read an interesting press release from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany’s polar research institute. It made the “panorama” page of our regional paper this morning. Their research vessel the Polarstern has just completed an Antarctic cruise and come up with the puzzling result that the deep sea in the Antarctic is actually getting colder. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest extent of sea-ice on record. The question is whether this is the start of a new trend, or just a one-off. The last ARCTIC summer was the warmest on record. The trouble is this latest report on Antarctic cooling might make a lot of people think global warming isn’t a danger after all.
See the latest information on the AWI English web page
Meanwhile, here in Bonn, Germany,it is beginning to feel like spring. The tulips in my garden are in full bloom. After a long cold, wet spell, it looks as if it’s going to heat up in the course of the week – in time to make sure my transition to the Alaskan Arctic is a bit of a shock to the system.
I’ve decided to look out some of my favourite ice and snow pictures to put us all in the right mood.

“Cloud wisps over Ny Alesund”. This shows fjord and glaciers taken from the French-German Arctic research base in Ny Alesund on Svalbard, Spitzbergen last June. I was lucky to get a couple of days of this sort of weather. It’s more likely to be overcast. But even those days still have a certain charm. The colours look completely different, as in this pic:

This is me in my survival suit at the Kongswegen glacier, taken on the same trip. The photo was taken by Rainer Vockenroth, the head of the research base, which is run jointly by the French and the German polar research institutes.We went along the glacier in a small boat. The water was 2°C, which means you can become unconscious in five minutes – unless you’re wearing one of these uncomfortable but admittedly useful outfits.