Climate Deadline. Paris, December 2015. The nations adopted the first truly universal climate treaty. That treaty is being ratified and implemented right now. Whose interest will it serve? What can be done?
I’m 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, and I appreciate your interest in this project.
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.
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. At Durban the nations took the decision to start the Paris 2015 work program (then called the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action), and I saw this as the perfect case study in which to exam the panoply of social forces constitutive of emergent global environmental governance.
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.
What follows on this page is the near-final fruit of that labor—whereas the final fruit will be a full length documentary film featuring additional material filmed at the Paris climate conference, November 30 – December 11, 2015.
Extensive film production and theory notes on the making of Climate Deadline are available at the International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (http://www.iicat.org/climate-deadline-paris-2015-iicat-ethnographic-film-project/)