Pushing the consumer perspective

CI Director General, Joost Martens, blogs from Copenhagen on influencing the decision makers.

One of our key goals in Copenhagen is to get the consumer angle on the map. This means a lot of lobbying, a lot of meetings with national delegates and a lot of relationship building if we are to influence opinion and decision-making.

Participation in many official and non-official meetings and events provides essential and useful building blocks for CI’s involvement and positioning. However at events like these it's important to read the situation on the ground, and that's why we felt we also needed to make a more general statement. Something that gives our targets an overall consumer perspective.

Having already prepared a booklet, Climate Change: The Consumer Perspective, for delegates at the venue, and published our policy positions online; we're now distributing a letter to the participating Heads of State and the heads of delegation.

Drafted by Rasmus (CI Head of delegation at COP15) and myself we set out the main reasons for consumer inclusion in the debate and the actions that need to be taken. At the same time, we are requesting leadership from governments for creating the conditions to make these crucial changes possible.

We'll be distributing this letter, together with the booklet, during the course of Thursday. And we'll also use it to target wider media coverage, during the relative lull over the next few days caused by Obama’s change of plans and the expected influx of people only attending over the weekend.

Tuvalu attack at COP15

CI Head of Delegation at COP15, Rasmus Kjeldahl continues his regular updates from inside the Copenhagen climate negotiations.

Consumer impact is just one of the many critical issues being discussed at Copenhagen. For some, like the residents of Tuvalu, climate change is an matter of immediate survival.

Tuvalu, a small island nation threatened to be inundated by the Pacific Ocean, became today’s subject of conversation and campaigning at COP15. At the forenoon plenary session Tuvalu called on a higher level of ambition: they demanded a deal limiting the maximum global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Many delegations from the South supported this demand and demanded that a new group was set up immediately with a view to drawing up a deal on this basis. This will require immediate and more extensive reductions in carbon emissions than have been agreed so far.

Tuvalu renders visible how serious the situation already is in many places in the world, but knowing how difficult it will be to reach agreement on a deal that keeps warming below 2 degrees, I’m afraid there is reason to be somewhat pessimistic about the future of Tuvalu. Sympathy is not sufficient to reach a result – there is also a need for money. A lot of money if the developing countries can have it their own way, less money according to the rich world. And there is a need for real GHG emissions reductions.

The matter of money was also the focus of several meetings today. Many people are concerned that the funding of climate measures will be taken from the aid to developing countries and that as a result we will just see a new internal distribution among them. So instead of investments in education and economic development funding will be redirected into the building of seawalls and wind power.

Among other slightly surprising subjects of debate was an argument between the Chinese delegation and the secretariat. The bone of contention was partly that a Chinese minister had been stopped twice by the security guards who had confiscated his badge (which threatened to provoke a minor diplomatic crisis), and partly dissatisfaction with the conference logo which according to the Chinese (and other delegations) signaled that the Kyoto Protocol was not important anymore. 
 
The conference fatigue starts to be visible in the faces of the delegates. The same food every day, a lot of coffee and the lack of fresh air can be felt. Physical endurance will be a critical factor to gaining influence for the next nine days…