News excerpt:
POZNAN, Poland (AFP) - - Oh dear... The BINGOs are at
odds with the TUNGOs and the RINGOs over the NAMAs and the NAPAs.
RFUK is concerned about what REDD is going to do to PAM. But at
least the SIDS are keen on LULUCF.
If you thought the science behind global warming was dauntingly
complex and believed "low albedo" was something to do with sex
drive -- it means poor reflection of sunlight -- then the UN
climate talks in Poznan are not for you.
Running until December 12, the negotiations for concluding a new
worldwide climate pact gather more than 10,000 policymakers,
industrialists and campaigners.
And they are awash in alphabet soup.
To give the key to the above sentences: BINGOs are Business and
Industry Non-Governmental Organisations.
TUNGOs and RINGOs are Trade Unions and Research and Independent
NGOs. NAMAs are Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, and
NAPAs are National Adaptation Programmes of Action.
RFUK is the United Kingdom Rainforest Foundation; REDD means
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation; and
PAM is Policies and Measures.
SIDS are Small Island Developing States and LULUCF is Land-use,
Land-use Change and Forestry.
And these are just a tiny number of the acronyms that have
sprung up in the climate arena.
"I came upon a new one this week -- MRV," said one delegate,
rather proudly. "It means measurable, reportable and
verifiable."
Over the past decade, acronyms have proliferated like hothouse
plants, say veterans of COPs, as meetings of the UN's Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are known (a COP is a
Conference of the Parties, which of course is quite different from
a MOP, or Meeting of the Parties).
"At my first COP, I kept wondering who this girl LULU was and
when I was going to meet her," said Steve Sawyer, a former
Greenpeace campaigner who is now secretary general of the Global
Wind Energy Council, a Brussels-based industry group.
Sawyer's memory goes back to the misty dawn of UNFCCC talks in
the 1990s.
In those simple, far-off times, QUELRO --- quantified emissions
limitation and reduction objective -- was the buzzword.
Now QUELRO has gone the way of the dodo.
With Darwinian ruthlessness, the term has become extinct, its
habitat invaded by newer, fitter species of words.
Once a scientific curiosity, climate change has become
recognised as a global threat, with far-reaching impacts for
economies and society.
As awareness of this peril has snowballed, so has the
multiplicity of proposed measures to deal with it, in such areas as
mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, addressing forest loss and
helping poor countries cope with the impact of climate change.
And as these measures are debated in the international arena,
new short-hand names emerge to make communication easier, although
who does the coining is a mystery.
Maybe it's the Bureau of Acronym, Blurb and Extreme
Linguistics... or BABEL for short.