GUP-SHUP SESSIONS: KEEPING UP WITH GLOBAL CLIMATE ACTION IN 2021

Welcome to the GUP-SHUP Sessions on CLIMATE CHANGE.

(Gup-Shup means Chit-Chat in various Indian languages. Basically, it's a Relaxed Conversation :)

For many reasons, 2021 promises to be a very active year in the Climate Change arena.

The year is packed with landmark regional and international meetings on Climate Change, leading up to the Big One called COP 26 at the end of the year in Glasgow, Scotland.

If you are interested in tracking the progress of multiple Climate Change meetings throughout the year and forming your own opinions, then you are in the right place!! 

For the next several weeks, I plan to regularly post some information on Climate Change that I think is important to be aware of. Just like all professional communities, the Climate Change community has its own vocabulary and concepts and references.

It's important to have a basic familiarity and comfort level with those words and concepts, in order to effectively follow news of the big climate discussions this year. Helping to increase that familiarity is the objective of my posts in the Gup-Shup Series on Climate Change. Being comfortable with the concepts may make the news more interesting and easier to follow. The meetings have already started this year, and will be pretty constant for the next eleven months.

If I am successful in sharing the concepts, then instead of skipping over the news articles and podcasts on Climate Change topics and updates on meetings, you may instead eagerly search for them and share updates with others! Perhaps you can even participate remotely in the debates, by sharing feedback through social media using their own terminology. If the leaders who represent us at these meetings know that we are all paying attention, they will be more likely to do the right thing!

Remember, while national governments announce the national strategies, it's their people, their businesses, their local governments and their civil society who are the ones that need to deliver on the promises. Nothing will work unless we all do our part. And it is much easier than you think, to join in, be involved, and help to make the needed changes!

That’s why I will be calling this the CLAP LOUDER TOGETHER Series. We can amplify the impact of each other’s actions. Every action counts, big or small.

Now is the right time to brush up on some of the concepts and terminology that we will be hearing a lot about, in the media coverage of the Climate Meetings.

After the posts on Climate Change, if possible, I still plan to make another set of posts on discussing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and why they are important, and then, if possible, I want to do the same on Clean Energy. All three of these topics are linked, and thinking about them together will help to deepen our understanding of the ongoing debates on the global stage during 2021.

The overall theme is CLAP LOUDER TOGETHER! I have called it Gup-Shup which is Hindi for Chit-Chat, indicating informality. I will try to convey my information as informally as I can, in conversational writing style.

My aim is to create a JAANKARI (INFORMATION) KA KHAZANA (TREASURY), or an Information Treasury. I will be hunting for "information treasure" on these topics, one after the other, and putting it into a series of posts…it will be there if you want to come and find it in the Treasury.

Let’s get started with the topic for DAY ONE, which is “What is the Difference Between Weather and Climate Change?”