DURBAN, South Africa, is buzzing with talks about the 17th United Nations climate talks, or COP17 starting today.The city itself is bedecked with signs welcoming the thousands of delegates expected at the talks.City managers have created bicycle lanes hoping to encourage less carbon intensive modes transportation during the talks. The Mayor of the city has also said that they hope to make the conference carbon neutral by having official delegates each pay 200 Rand. This money would be used to create forests that would absorb the carbon to be emitted during the conference.Creating a forest for carbon neutrality raises questions. How long will it take for the trees to grow and for the forest to emerge' Do we pollute today and offset the pollution in the future' Is this a cosmetic gesture'South Africa is the most carbon intensive country in Africa. Its electricity supply is carbon intensive and so are the coal, gold, platinum and other mines.Last year, South Africa's electricity company, ESKOM, received a huge loan to build one of the largest coal fired power plants in the world with the backing of the World Bank. With the World Bank embedded in the climate change financial architecture, a greater host for the COP17 could not have been any other than South Africa.The general feeling among people coming to Durban ' official and non official ' is that COP17 will not deliver anything significantly different from what came out of the climate talks one year ago in Cancun, Mexico. In the week just before the climate talks I attended a fascinating debate at Dirty Energy Week hosted by Friends of the Earth South Africa. A panel at the event debated whether there was any need for civil society groups to engage with the UN talks at all. Many participants feel that these UN talks sap a lot of energy and give nothing other than setting the stage for catastrophic climate change for Africa and around the world.One side of the debate insisted that if civil society does not engage with the UN talks then the space would certainly be taken up by polluters and by those who see climate change not as a crisis but as a business opportunity, such as carbon traders.The other side characterised the continued participation of civil society at the UN talks as a manifestation of the 'Stockholm syndrome' where the kidnapped marries the kidnapper and would not see an open door of escape even if the door were wide open and unguarded.As COP17 is set to open, African civil society activists are alarmed over a statement credited to the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zewani, who is the spokesperson for the African Union. Zewani was reported to have said that Africa would be flexible in the negotiations.This announcement would weaken considerably the hands of African negotiators who have taken a strong stance against the failure of developed countries to deliver on their moral and legal obligations for climate action.Besides the highly vulnerable small island states, Africa is really set to be worst hit by catastrophic climate change. The impacts are already here. Droughts and famines have raged in the Horn of Africa. Unusual rains and floods, increased desertification. It is also uncontested that Africa will experience heightened levels of temperature increases above global averages, further compounding the impacts. No wonder Bobby Peek, Director of Friends of the Earth South Africa, insists that 'to tackle the climate crisis, we need a transformation in our unjust and unsustainable economies and their basis in dirty, polluting fossil fuels.'Peek compares the struggle to the mass efforts that saw the defeat of apartheid in South Africa.'Once again, our communities need to organise, mobilise and help build not just a new South Africa but a new just and sustainable world that puts the interests and needs of ordinary people and communities first.'The climate conference is set to open on a note of rather low ambition and expectation. The Green Climate Finance proposal that received applause from delegates to last year's conference will likely not be concretised at Durban. Industrialised countries with struggling economies are feet-dragging and are most likely going to skirt around the issues of finalising the mechanisms to kick off the scheme.The other issue now is not whether COP17 will deliver an acceptable climate agreement. The question may well be whether the peoples' uprisings in the world will echo in Durban and whether the politicians will hear the demands of the people or merely listen to polluters.Will this be a Conference of Parties, or will it be a Conference of Polluters' Will carbon trading and its array of market mechanisms that deliver on them run rampant' Will the so-called Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) be finally seen as Corporate Development Mechanism, Corrupt Development Mechanism or Crimes Development Mechanism' 'Bassey is an Environment Rights Activist
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