Environmental activists, indigenous leaders and Hollywood celebrities gathered in Bolivia yesterday ahead of the first self-styled “people’s conference” on climate change.
Attendees said the summit would focus on the plight of the world’s poorest, which they said went largely ignored at official UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen in December.
The Copenhagen meeting was widely drubbed for failing to produce a new treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions and critics said the deal it produced would not avert a climate catastrophe.
PHOTO: EPA
The “People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights,” which runs until tomorrow, will draft new proposals to be offered for consideration at the next UN climate talks in Mexico at the end of the year.
Bolivian Ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon said the summit, which was expected to draw 18,000 people, was “the only way to get the climate change talks back on track.”
Developing nations have resisted a legally binding climate treaty, arguing that wealthy nations must bear the primary responsibility for climate change.
Nearly 130 countries, including many of the world’s poorest, will be represented at the Cochabamba conference. Anti-globalization activists Naomi Klein of Canada and Jose Bove of France were set to attend. Organizers have also invited James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film Avatar, and James Hansen, a US researcher who was among the first to warn about climate change.
Indigenous leaders, including Nilo Cayuqueo, an indigenous Mapuche from Argentina, were also in town, concerned about the impact of climate change on their homelands.
“We have great extremes of heat and cold, and as a result we’re seeing illnesses and outbreaks that once had disappeared,” Cayuqueo said.
This week’s gathering will also give a giant megaphone to a left-leaning bloc of Latin American leaders, including Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales.
The conference will seek to refine proposals presented by Morales in Copenhagen that included the creation of a world tribunal for climate issues and a global referendum on environmental choices.
The conference begins the day after representatives from the world’s leading economies gathered in Washington for a preparatory meeting ahead of the December UN summit in Cancun.
The US-led Major Economies Forum comprises 17 countries responsible for the bulk of global emissions and excludes smaller nations such as Sudan whose firebrand negotiators held up sessions at last year’s Copenhagen summit.
Washington hopes the closed-door talks will allow key nations to quietly assess what they can achieve heading into the next major climate summit in Cancun.
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