By Komila Nabiyeva | Mon., June 27, 4:47 PM | Comments ( 1 )
A farmer stands near his yurt on a high-altitude summer pasture called Suusamyr, some 170 km (106 miles) south of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, June 17, 2011. REUTERS/Vladimir Pirogo
By Komila Nabiyeva
As the climate talks in Bonn wound down earlier this month, there was fading enthusiasm among environmental activists and journalists. On the penultimate day, Yvo de Boer, the former head of the U.N. climate secretariat, declared the Kyoto Protocol was dead.
At the final U.N. press conference Christina Figueres, de Boer’s successor, seemed annoyed by repetition of the same question: “Is there a crisis in the negotiations?” “Governments, business and civil society cannot solve climate change in one meeting,” she insisted.
Many of the journalists at the summit have been following the U.N. climate talks for a long time now, most recently in Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen and Cancun. With the next annual summit looming in Durban, South Africa, in November, the future of the new international agreement that is due to succeed the Kyoto Protocol remains under a big question mark.
Hopes for any concrete outcome to the conference are fading. Some countries deliberately block the negotiations (Japan, Russia and Canada are refusing to sign up to a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol) and the EU does not want to be the sole warrior on the battle field. To make things worse, the latest report of the International Energy Agency claims greenhouse emissions rose to a record level last year despite the financial crisis.
But, despite the collective fatigue, there are still examples of small local acts that are tackling the problem of climate change.
SOLAR POWER FOR KYRGYZ HOSPITALS
One of these, showcased at the Bonn conference, is introducing solar energy to rural hospitals in Kyrgyzstan for the first time. Nearly all - 94 percent - of the territory of this tiny Central Asian country lies in the mountains. And because its old infrastructure dates back to Soviet times, many Kyrgyz kishlaks, or villages, suffer from regular disruptions to their power and water supplies.
From August this year, solar panels will start transforming the sun’s rays into clean energy and hot water as part of a pilot project in five hospitals in remote mountainous provinces.
The project is sponsored by the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and implemented by the World Health Organisation. It is part of a programme called “Protecting health from climate change” which covers seven countries in Southeast Europe and Central Asia.
With more than 300 sunny days a year, Kyrgyzstan is in a perfect position to harness solar energy.
“Lack of hot water is a big problem for many hospitals in our villages. To wash themselves, patients often have to heat water in a kettle,” explains Artur Buyuklyanov, a former doctor and presently the WHO’s national officer in Kyrgyzstan. “You can imagine that a kettle of water is not enough and, say, for a woman who just confined (given birth), it is a hard task to do. The solar panels, which we are going to install on the hospital roof, will enable constant access to hot water.”
Electricity supply is also irregular, Buyuklyanov adds. “Sometimes during operations the lights switch off. Doctors have to use candles and flashlights. It is difficult to keep vaccines and other medicine in the hospitals. Now thanks to the solar panels, hospitals will be independent of unstable central electricity.”
“We want to show how effective it is to use renewable energy technologies in the hospitals,” he says. “We hope that similar initiatives will arise not only in Kyrgyzstan but also in other Central Asian countries.”
In fact, building on WHO research, a new UNDP project has recently been launched to provide an additional 20 Kyrgyz hospital with solar power panels.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Mars Amanaliev, who heads the official Kyrgyz delegation to the U.N. climate talks, is also head of the Climate and Ozone Coordination Centre in Kyrgyzstan. He’s got used to the slow pace of the negotiations but feels it’s a pity the processes have become so complicated.
He starts to count up the numerous meetings, held simultaneously on a variety of technical and policy issues: working groups, contact groups, spin-off groups, informal groups and “informal-informal” groups.
In contrast to some countries, his tiny delegation to Bonn consists of just three people.
Nonetheless, he is still motivated to attend the talks. In the last 10 years, there has been a huge inflow of new technologies and innovations, which he says are helping his country adapt to the consequences of climate change step by step.
“Here in Bonn, we meet a lot, formally and informally, with representatives of other countries and international organisations and discuss our problems. As a result of such meetings new projects are born and conceptualised.” He proudly gestures to his suitcase, stuffed with new ideas and projects. This, he says, is very good news for Kyrgyzstan no matter what happens inside the negotiating rooms.
Komila Nabiyeva is an Uzbek journalist who attended the U.N. climate talks in Bonn this month. This blog was produced by Panos London and the Climate Change Media Partnership.
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