We must not accept Copenhagen’s failings
World leaders must listen to the people who put them in power and quickly make amends for failing to deliver a binding climate deal in Copenhagen, says Tim Aldred. In this week's Green Room, he says time is not on our side, as many of the world's poorest nations are already feeling the effects of climate change.
“We must spare no effort in carrying the voices of those most affected in poor countries to those in power who so spectacularly disappointed in Denmark” Copenhagen: Deal or no deal?
"Hopenhagen" - the epithet enthusiastically bestowed upon the recent climate talks in Denmark - has turned out to be not only a touch cheesy, but with hindsight, hopelessly misplaced and painfully mocking.
Aside from the to-be-expected justifications from the politicians themselves, rarely have verdicts on international summits been quite so united in their expressions of disappointment, derision and outright condemnation.
And yet ordinary citizens had made plain to their politicians what was required.
A week before I left for Copenhagen, I marched with 50,000 people in the streets of London - one of several thousand events held in 140 countries around the world.
An 11th-hour email petition, as the summit stumbled to a conclusion, attracted an extraordinary 14 million signatures. Millions of people were speaking, but were not being heard by the politicians.
After two years of build-up to Copenhagen, the highlights of what our politicians agreed in our name were:
• A near-global acknowledgement that global warming should be limited to less than 2C (3.6F), the degree of warming generally accepted as being "dangerous". Arguably, this was one of the top "successes" from Copenhagen
• Rich countries must register the emissions cuts they will make by 2020 by the end of January 2010. However, there is no guarantee that this will limit warming in the future as what countries announce they will cut is up to them
• New and additional money "approaching $30bn" will be channelled to poorer nations over the period 2010-12, and the goal of providing an annual sum of $100bn by 2020. But there remain real questions about whether a special Copenhagen Green Climate Fund will reach the target of $100bn, which many say is, at best, half of what is needed
But this is nowhere near enough. As ordinary citizens we must now redouble our efforts to get the politicians back to the negotiating table.
Something rotten
We must spare no effort in carrying the voices of those most affected in poor countries to those in power who so spectacularly disappointed in Denmark.
Here are two such responses from people with whom I work:
Firstly, Bruno Guemes, a development worker for Progressio in Peru:
"People here feel that these international summits are more of a power game rather than about meeting real need.
Nice place, shame about the deal - Copenhagen failed to deliver
"In the valley of Huaral, one of the country's most fragile zones, where a third of people rely on small-scale farming to make a living and feed their families, glaciers and snow-caps are melting, rains are less frequent and water resources are running dry.
"In one community, people are taking decisive action in response to water shortages - all but the elderly are leaving their ancestral lands.
"If governments continue with a 'business as usual' approach to climate change - as they did in Copenhagen - we will be left alone."
Secondly, Angel Maria Ibarra Turcios, director of Salvadorian Ecological Unity:
"My first reaction to the outcome of the Copenhagen summit was one of indignation.
"We (the civil society) are not going to accept the failure of Copenhagen. The governments have failed, which means that we have to find new ways of civil society involvement.
"We have to find new partnerships between organisations in the North and the South.
"The Central American region is already experiencing climate change. We had a major drought last year, followed by a flooding. Two hundred people died.
Marches in cities around the globe urged world leaders to act
"We are disappointed but not defeated. We'll keep working for a better tomorrow because we believe that the future has to be a future of peace and hope for the whole world."
It is the voices of people like Bruno and Angel, who face the realities of climate change every day, that can spur those of us in rich countries to do more than just change our light bulbs and put our televisions on standby.
We must play a part in changing the politics-as-usual approach to climate change. We must help to generate an irresistible mass movement of ordinary citizens in order to intensify the pressure around climate change - so that politicians will have to take brave action at the climate summit in Mexico in 2010.
They must hear that we do not accept this outcome from Copenhagen, and we demand that they do better.
They must hear that we are not going away and that we will come back stronger. If we allow this defeat to stop us as ordinary citizens from campaigning and bringing pressure, then the climate sceptics will have won. We cannot allow that to happen.
For some of us, taking greater action might mean joining one of the many development and environmental groups who constantly cajole and seek to persuade politicians to take faster and deeper action on climate change.
Wherever we live in the developed and developing world, if we have the opportunity, let us meet politicians, write letters, join campaigns, march on the streets as we did in our tens of thousands in the run-up to Copenhagen, but in vastly greater numbers.
In 12 months, we want the glow of success from the Mexico summit to make "Hopenhagen" seem like a bad dream.
Tim Aldred is head of policy for Progressio, an international development agency that works with poor communities in 11 countries
© MMIX
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