Climate Deadline is an ambitious documentary in the making, taking us from the UN climate talks in Durban in 2011 (COP17) to COP21 in Paris this December, where this project will be finalised and the nations will adopt the next universal climate treaty. That treaty is being created right now. Whose interest will it serve? What can be done?
Dr. Richard Widick, Sociologist, Co-Director of the International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (IICAT.ORG) and Visiting Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is our guide.
This work is dedicated to enhancing public participation in the United Nations climate negotiations, at which for the last five years I have been conducting interdisciplinary participatory observation and ethnographic film research.
During the months of September through November, 2015, I will here publish key segments of this research, including key interviews and street scenes from the last four convocations of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The first Conference of the Parties (COP) I attended convened in Durban, South Africa, Dec. 1 -10, 2011.
During two weeks of field research in Durban, I determined to dedicate the next phase of my academic studies to developing a public sociology of the climate talks.
With my cameras turned on, I returned to COP 18 in Doha, Qatar 2012, COP 19 in Warsaw, Poland 2013, and COP 20 in Lima, Peru 2014—each time again representing the University of California as an official UN Observer Delegate from Civil Society.
This film is the near-final fruit of that labor—whereas the final fruit will be a full length documentary film featuring additional material to be filmed at the Paris climate conference, November 30 – December 11, 2015.