They Are Listening

The following is the speech delivered by Sylvia Wachira, from the Clean Energy and Safe Environment Initiative during the 4th meeting for the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) on December 10:

I am speaking as a member of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance and Climate Justice Now!

Africa stands on the frontline of climate change. It is a cruel irony indeed that a people who have lived for so long in harmony with nature are now suffering the disastrous effects of greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries.

For over two centuries the industrialized world became wealthy by drenching the atmosphere in carbon and plundering resources from every region of the world.

The current proposal and pledges by Annex I Parties are supposedly aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees. They will not, and 2 degrees is a death sentence for Africa.  According to the IPCC, Africa will warm by more than the average global level. 2 degrees globally means 3 or more degrees for my continent.

Such an increase in temperature would lead to widespread devastation.

It will lead to massive reduction in crop yields in some areas, cutting food outputs in half. More than 600 million people left without adequate water supplies. Our coastlines, villages and cattle will be ravaged. Literally millions of people will die.

The injustice does not stop here. Based on Annex I Parties current proposals and pledges, the 20% of people living in developed countries would consume over 60% of the Earth’s atmospheric space while the 80% who are poor will be consigned to live within the remaining 40%.  You are literally stealing from us the very sky over our heads.

A mere $10 billion is proposed under the Convention negotiations in so-called short-term financing, while the rich countries seek to appropriate from poor countries an atmospheric resource worth trillions. Your 10 billion will not be enough to buy our coffins.

We are expected to accept this deal. Worse still we are expected to celebrate this as success.

We will not.

This grab of our shared atmospheric resource is nothing less than climate colonialism.

Yesterday, African civil society marched alongside Parliamentarians from across the continent chanting: “Two degrees is suicide” and “One Africa, One Degree”.  You must all be absolutely clear: we will not die in silence.

It is a Big Deal that OBAMA IS ATTENDING COP15 (?)

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8378890.stm

So Obama is attending is COP15.

But please reflect: why is it such a big deal that Obama is attending COP15? Indeed, teamwork is crucial and most effective. When someone lags in their responsibilities, the leader and other team members can still cooperate and accomplish their shared goals.

President Barack Obama is to pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the US in several stages, beginning with a 17% cut by 2020, the White House has said. The offer will be made at December’s UN climate talks in Copenhagen, which Mr Obama will attend.

But he does not plan to be there for the crucial last days, when delegates including other world leaders are hoping to pull together a deal.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said his attendance could be vital for a deal. Correspondents say most nations have given up hope of a legally binding treaty because of uncertainty about the US position. (How about NOT following the “Leader”? What happened to initiative and innovation?)

But with legislation currently stuck in the Senate, correspondents say the president will be unable to commit to any of the figures he is proposing at the summit.

BBC environment correspondent Richard Black says that on that basis the US figure amounts to just a few percentage points, as its emissions have risen by about 15% since 1990. The cuts proposed by Mr Obama are similar to those included in a bill passed by the US House of Representatives in June.

This is much less than the EU’s pledge of a 20% cut over the same period, or a 30% cut if there is a global deal; and much less than the 25-40% figure that developing countries are demanding. Australia has pledged a 25% cut from 2000 levels and Japan has also pledged a 25% cut from their 1990 levels.

The US president will be in the Danish capital on 9 December, a day before receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.”Obama’s pledge to go to Copenhagen is a welcome and significant development – but he must adopt a ‘Yes we can’ attitude in the UN climate talks if he is to earn his Nobel prize,” spokesman Tom Picken said.

“The US is the world’s biggest per capita polluter (and the second largest polluter after China). It has a moral responsibility to take the lead in securing a strong and fair agreement.” (A strong and fair action for the global community.)

Delegations from 192 countries will be attending the summit. Leaders of United States, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil are planning to attend. (But will they stay for the concluding days? Or just drop by?)

Hu Jintao, president of the world’s largest polluter, China, is yet to commit to attending. India has not yet(!) committed either.

So, there are two weeks to go before the Copenhagen conference. The final round of preparatory talks in Barcelona has revealed deep divisions between some of the key participants. Use the following table to study their positions (from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8345343.stm):

WHY WASTE WASTE?

Elephants eat a lot, and thus, poo a lot. Besides the lovely dung beetles and other pooper-scoopers, here’s how to close the loop for elephant poo:

• Survival Tip! Bear Grylls squeezes water from elephant dung – to drink. Watch this: http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/27888-man-vs-wild-using-elephant-dung-for-hydration-video.htm

   

• Manketti nuts are collected from elephant dung. The hard nut remains intact through the digestive process. Read the story: http://www.naturalhub.com/natural_food_guide_nuts_uncommon_Ricinodendron_rautanenii.htm

• ”Elephants and their dung can play a facilitative role for other organisms.” Three different species of frogs have been discovered living in the dung of the Asian elephant in southeastern Sri Lanka. For more information: http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0610-hance_elephantdung.html

• Elephant dung is also a mosquito repellent! “When burnt, it gives out a pungent smoke that keeps mosquitoes away.” Can you smell it? http://www.deccanherald.com/content/36536/elephant-dung-source-livelihood-mosquito.html

   

• There’s actually a poo load of elephant poo in stock at the University of Waterloo Bookstore – in the form of paper! Find out how it’s made: http://www.ecomaximus.co.uk/how-elephant-dung-paper-is-made.htm

• Elephant manure is highly prized by gardeners! Furthermore, according to Blake et al. (2009). Forest elephants: Tree planters of the Congo. Biotropica, 41(4):
  “Analysis of 855 elephant dung piles suggested that forest elephants disperse more intact seeds than any other species or genus of large vertebrate in African forests, while GPS telemetry data showed that forest elephants regularly disperse seeds over unprecedented distances compared to other dispersers. Our results suggest that the loss of forest elephants (and other large-bodied dispersers) may lead to a wave of recruitment failure among animal-dispersed tree species, and favour regeneration of the species-poor abiotically dispersed guild of trees.”

Protect elephants, and their poo.