Wrecking Weeks in Poznan - Where's Human Safety Talks?
Awicaks, Facebook Notes, Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 3:07pm
Poznań is a city in west-central Poland with over 567,882 inhabitants (2006). Located on the Warta River, it is one of the oldest cities in Poland, making it an important historical centre and a vibrant centre of trade, industry, and education. Poznań is Poland's fifth largest city and fourth biggest industrial centre. It is also the administrative capital of the Greater Poland Voivodeship, one of important administrative province in Poland. Poznań is the host city for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, taking place in PIF Conference Centre. The conference is a key event in the creation of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
Over two weeks in early freezed December 2008 more than ten thousands people from all over the world were hanging around in the conference centre and have enjoyed Poznan tram services for free by only showing the conference badges. Temperature over the past two weeks dropped from 1 centigrade to -5 centigrade as soon as the conference was officially closed a day earlier. Most of environmental and social justice activists are disappointed to its results.
"This has been a wasteful two weeks!" Shouted one indigenous peoples activist from Africa who couldn't hide her anguish expression. One of the subsidiary body under the Convention of the Parties (COP) 14 agreed to remove indigenous peoples and local communities rights from the decision text and merely put in the annex with watered down wording of effective participation of indigenous people. "They even removed 'S' from 'peoples'!" Cried her. Yes, indeed, parties like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, preferred recognition towards individual rights than collective rights that are embedding most of the indigenous peoples all over the world.
A veteran environmental activist from Germany also complained on how the parties have treated forests are merely as carbon stocks, undermining its social and ecological functions. Instead of to keep and protect the remaining intact forests most of the parties preferred to enhance carbon stocks, a nice little phrase to represent trees replanting or reforestation and afforestation, whilst deforestation are continuing to intensify for the sake of the development. Whose is development anyway?
With new buzzwords of low carbon economy, the nuclear lobbyists were aggressively promoting the highly risk and extremely expensive technology to the developing countries. Even the British Energy Chief promotes the nuclear energy as solution of the climate change and to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, undermining hundred of nuclear industrial leaks incidents all over the world that jeopardize human safety. Another false solution promoted in the conference venues is biofuel or agrofuels as a green energy source, overlooking severe and critical issues. Not to mention hundreds of business options offered for carbon emitted industries for sophisticated technology of carbon accounting, and clean development mechanism, a cheesy tactic to divert emission cut obligation by creating project in the developing countries.
Does anyone see that climate change is unequivocal evidence of the bankruptcy of the global development model? A model that is characterized as land hunger, fossil fuels hunger, war hunger, cheap labor hunger, water hunger, and had long been disorienting the developing countries to simply copy the industrial related lifestyles, as seen on Hollywood movies and commercial ads of global modern products. A development model that doesn't provide any single room for peoples who cannot catch up the economic scale of the global industrial standards, to whom poverty label is given. A model that had long been spoiling few of the global population to enjoy luxury lifestyles at the costs of deprivation of land, water, mineral, oil and gas, and other natural resources.
I can now clearly understand why the removal of 'S' is a big deal for the African indigenous peoples' activist.
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