by Mihai Stoica

The waste issue in the Danube Delta is beginning to weigh heavily on its biodiversity and on the deltaic communities, but it is a tangled issue for the authorities which prefer to pass the blame from one to the other. Meanwhile, in Sulina, the garbage dump, located approximately 5 kilometers away from the city close to its beach, everything is business as usual: the garbage men work with inappropriate protection and equipment, the dump is far from meeting the compliance standards for functioning within the confines of a biosphere reserve and there are people, cows and dogs living off the dump. There are also other animals dying off it, as the plastic bags usually take flight encouraged by a gust of wind and end up in the sea or elsewhere on the ground, endangering birds and other fauna which suffocate on or ingest them. The situation is in dire straits throughout the entire Danube Delta and garbage is frequently ending up in its canals. Is there a way out of this situation before the issue becomes a heavier burden on the whole deltaic ecosystem, one of the richest in biodiversity in the whole world? The question lies yet unanswered, as the problem becomes more and more a matter of political dispute, rather than of taking action.

by Mihai Stoica

The energy producing giants of a past industrial era are still provokingly burning coal in their furnaces before the infants of renewable energies. In Romania, coal remains the main fuel for household energy consumption and its use soared in the past few years. Power plants like the one at Turceni, Romania’s largest energy producer and one of the largest thermal power plants in Europe, are on the lookout for investors in trying to keep up with European regulations regarding emissions. Even with new filters installed and investments made to upgrade some of the obsolete machinery, the truth of the matter is that these plants are wasting a lot of energy during the production process and have thus become industrial age dinosaurs puffing on in the 21st century. The following images represent a suffocating reality and tell us that these energy producing colossi won’t disappear too soon from the Romanian industrial landscape.

by Mihai Stoica

The Conference of Parties in Copenhagen – also known as the COP15 or the Copenhagen Climate Summit – which took place between the 7th and 18th of December ’09, has come to be known by many as the biggest failure in climate change negotiations since the process started under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) umbrella.

Short Historical Background of Climate Change Negotiations

The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty produced in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, aiming to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The parties to the convention, represented by nation states, adopted in 1997 a protocol to the convention – called the Kyoto Protocol – which would set mandatory, legally binding targets for industrialized countries in order to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The protocol entered into force in 2005, when an appropriate number of developed countries ratified it, in order to make the reduction targets significant. The Kyoto Protocol, with its different bodies and mechanisms designated its first period of implementation between 2008 and 2012. Within this period, signatory countries had to stick to their pledges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007, the Bali Road Map was adopted as a two-year process to finalizing a binding agreement in 2009 in Copenhagen for furthering the Kyoto Protocol beyond its first implementation period. This was a promise that big polluters like the US, China, Brazil, India and the rest of the world would sign a legally binding agreement that would, through different mechanisms and policies, reduce emissions and restrict an increase in global temperature to 2̊ Celsius – as recommended by science – which would avert catastrophic changes to the climate system.

Enter Copenhagen…

The stage was set and the world was watching. A significant number of NGOs and grassroots organizations ran campaigns before and during the negotiations. The host country, Denmark, highlighted the relevance of this opportunity to mitigate climate change. As world leaders announced their participation, coupled with renewed interest of the United States to sit down at the negotiations table, media coverage of the event reached incredible heights. The COP15 in Copenhagen represented a worldwide peak in the interest on climate change and negotiations for its alleviation.As the summit began, expectations ran high. Unfortunately, a few months prior to the event there was already talk of an impossibility to reach a legally binding agreement due to factors such as the worldwide economic crisis that hit in 2008. Another important factor was the deadlock reached between two of the major players, the US and China. China was in no mood to have its own long-awaited development curtailed in order to compensate for the burden of the greenhouse gases already emitted by developed nations during their industrialization. The Chinese came to Copenhagen with expectations that developed countries, especially America, will offer cuts in greenhouse gases that far surpass anything the industrialized world was likely to offer. The US also lost its bargaining chip with China when, earlier that year, it failed to pass climate legislation in the Senate. The agenda was re-set for reaching a “strong” political agreement.

This lead to increased pressure from the civil society and a push for a “fair and binding agreement” began just as the first week of the negotiations was drawing to a close. An outburst of protests followed, as protesters from around the world, joined by NGOs and other organizations, gathered on the 12th of December to march towards Bella Center – the venue of the conference. The march was followed closely by a massive police force and, as tensions grew, this lead to almost a thousand arrests that day. In the following days protests intensified and, on the final days of the conference, protesters planned on making a final push to get inside Bella Center and try to influence the negotiation process. The try proved futile as police forces started using pepper spray and batons to disperse them, as photojournalists and cameramen got caught in the cross-fire.

As more media and delegates started arriving in the second week of the negotiations, NGOs were literally thrown out of Bella Center to make way for new arrivals. The cause of this was a mistake made by the organizers, the UN, who accredited 45.000 representatives from media, NGOs and convention parties, with disregard to the fact that the overall capacity of the venue didn’t reach beyond 15.000 people. Chaos ensued, as the accreditation system broke down leaving hundreds of people stranded for more than eight hours in the freezing cold without food or water.

The atmosphere inside Bella Center throughout the event was hectic with NGOs demonstrating, media swarming around, press conferences taking place, delegates meeting and working wherever they found some space and people trying to find their way around a chaotic labyrinth. At one point negotiations were on the verge of failure with developing countries wanting to pull out of what they said was an unfair deal. E-mails of draft documents began leaking to the media creating massive speculation around what began to be seen as a failed process. On the last days of the summit, leaders of developed countries took it to the back-rooms in a last effort to salvage the negotiations from complete breakdown. The outcome was a three page document which was not legally binding and does not commit countries to agree to a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The body of work exhibited is attempting a holistic visual narrative of the events that took place during the two week summit, highlighting Copenhagen as Europe’s ‘greenest’ metropolis.

Photos by Livia Cimpoeru

The Danube Delta falls within east European steppe ecosystem, with Mediterranean influences. As a young region in full process of consolidation, the Danube Delta represents a very favourable place for the development of highly diverse flora and fauna, unique in Europe, with numerous rare species. It hosts 23 natural ecosystems, but due to the extent of wetlands the aquatic environment is prevalent; the terrestrial environment is also present on the higher grounds of the continental levees, where xerophile ecosystems have developed. Between the aquatic and terrestrial environments, is interposed a swampy, easily flooded strip of original flora and fauna, with means of adaptation for water or land, depending on the season or the hydrological regime. At the contact between freshwater and sea water, some special physical, chemical and biological processes take place, which determined biologists to consider this area as a very different ecosystem called beforedelta. Musura Gulf, north of Sulina, and Saint George Gulf are considered the most representative for this type of ecosystem.

Situated on major migratory routes, and providing adequate conditions for nesting and hatching, the Danube Delta is a magnet for birds from six major eco-regions of the world, including the Mongolian, Arctic and Siberian. There are over 320 species of birds found in the delta during summer, of which 166 are hatching species and 159 are migratory. Over one million individuals (swans, wild ducks, bald coots, etc.) winter here.