(COPENHAGEN) The EnviroMedia team is meeting tomorrow for breakfast other Austin folks here attending COP 15. There is a great Austin nonprofit called Rainforest Partnership networking here that you should know about. So I asked Niyanta Spelman, their executive director, to write a blog entry about her experience in Copenhagen.
Maurine Winkley and Niyanta Spelman with Copenhagen Mayor Klaus Bondam
There is so much going on here in Copenhagen. It is exciting to hear all the different things people are doing and being creative in the most amazing ways. Yesterday someone mentioned that when she was at COP 1 in Berlin in 1995, she was one of about 150 representing NGOs. Here at COP 15, there may be 20,000 NGO personnel from all over the world. To be one of those, it is difficult not to be inspired by the passion and commitment of so many. One can not be part of this kind of a gathering from all over the world and ignore the magnitude of the problem and the urgency people feel.
In the US we still don’t quite think seriously enough of climate change. But being here sitting besides people from all around the planet, we cannot ignore our role in the past contributing to global climate emissions, nor our responsibility on this world stage to do something real. Even if China overtook us in global carbon emissions last year as the largest emitter of these emissions, our per capita emissions are 4-5 times that of the Chinese. How can we justify not taking responsibility and the lead on this matter at this crucial time? Will we, the most innovative nation of optimists and entrepreneurs (and I think of myself as a social entrepreneur), lead in finding the solutions necessary to limit global emissions to do any more harm?
There is so much going on here beyond what the mainstream media is covering. It feels like everyone is here participating in some way, and there is much hope in this city now referred to as Hopenhagen. There is also despair as various proposals are being considered by the UNFCCC and being laid by the wayside. There are such complex issues and choices that lie before us.
For us at Rainforest Partnership, it is very exciting. There are so many partnerships we are able to forge here, meet with so many people and conduct business in a very concentrated, productive way. We are an Austin, Texas based nonprofit organization that works with rainforest communities in Latin America by supporting alternative and sustainable ways of making an income that allows our partner communities to keep their forests standing.
But it is the other part of what we do that is a challenge. Deforestation plays a very big role in climate change. About a fifth of all carbon emissions come from deforestation and degradation of tropical forests (cutting and burning of trees). How do we get folks in the US to think about what we consume and how we consume it that affects the choices people are making in the countries where the deforestation is occurring?
At the U.S. presidential level, we seem to be understanding what is at stake and what needs to be done. Listening to Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy, the other day talk about what the US will do to meet this challenge and the President’s commitment, I was encouraged. But what struck me the most was how he ended his talk. We need to fix this problem of climate change because there is only one earth, we have nowhere else to go.
I talked to a young Nigerian youth delegate who was so depressed that she stayed away all day, one day this week and then I talked to her and she promised to continue participating. Will she and the many North American youth delegates (I have tried to recruit some as interns for Rainforest Partnership!) be inspired when COP 15 is over? Or, are they going to leave here thinking that their future remains so bleak because our political leaders could not act in the face of this biggest challenge the planet has ever faced.
Niyanta Spelman is Executive Director of Austin-based Rainforest Partnership.
Learn more about REDD and deforestation in our climate decoder.
