Activists launched what they called the world’s biggest campaign to combat global warming on Friday, urging governments to agree a tough UN climate pact at talks in Copenhagen starting in 100 days’ time.
Environmental organizations, trade unions, religious groups, scientists, anti-poverty campaigners and others representing tens of millions of people teamed up to put pressure for curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
“Time is running out,” said Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Global Campaign for Climate Action “TckTckTck” campaign, meant to refer to the sound of a clock ticking as the UN meeting draws closer and climate change becomes irreversible.
TckTckTck would include actions such as rallies or online advertisements to show, for instance, how people in developing nations are already suffering from global warming and how a shift to green jobs could help recovery from recession.
Friday was exactly 100 days from the Dec. 7 start of the two-week meeting in Denmark due to agree a successor to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol to rein in changes such as more droughts, floods, rising sea levels, spread of disease and heatwaves.
“We are deeply anxious that the negotiations are not where they need to be,” Naidoo said in a telephone interview from South Africa. In a statement, TckTckTck called itself “the biggest ever climate change campaign.”
He urged a “massive push by ordinary men, women and young people in the remaining 100 days.”
Two negotiating sessions remain before Copenhagen, in Bangkok and Barcelona.
He said Friday was the official launch of the campaign, which has already staged some events such as installing a loud ticking noise in a hotel in Bonn where climate negotiators met in June.
Participants include environmental groups Greenpeace and WWF, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the World Conference of Religions for Peace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an international umbrella group for trade unions, the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF and a group run by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.
“The outlook is looking bleak — but it doesn’t have to be,” Greenpeace wrote in a report on the state of the UN talks.
It said negotiators were deadlocked over whether developed nations would adopt strong 2020 targets and whether they would also provide billions of dollars to help developing nations.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS