Civil society groups walk out of UN climate conference in Warsaw (COP19) protesting inaction by WWF, CARE, Oxfam, ActionAid, FOE 2:38pm 25th Nov, 2013   23 November 2013    Change needed for climate negotiations in Lima 2014.    WWF issued the following statement today from Samantha Smith, Leader of WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, as the UN climate talks drew to a conclusion:    “The climate change threat has given us a clear choice – a future where destructive weather events like Typhoon Haiyan become the norm, or a world powered by clean renewable energy.    “Negotiators in Warsaw were clearly unprepared or unable to take us towards a better future.    “They showed up unprepared to negotiate in good faith, particularly on issues affecting the most vulnerable people. The Japanese government backtracked on its previous commitments to cut emissions, and the new government in Australia is moving to water-down domestic climate legislation and being cheered on by the Canadian government. “The lack of urgency shown by governments in this process has been sickening. And that’s why we walked out of these climate talks in Warsaw earlier this week.    “Negotiators in Warsaw should have used this meeting to take a big and critical step towards global, just action on climate change. That didn’t happen. This has placed the negotiations towards a global agreement in 2015 at risk.    “A repeat performance next year would be disastrous, not just for the progress of these negotiations, but more importantly for vulnerable communities everywhere and the natural world on which we all depend.    “The most polluting industries cast a long shadow over these talks, and governments put their own interests ahead of global citizens. That needs to change – there’s no way we can get a strong climate change deal in 2015 until governments reflect the concerns of the people, and not the interests of the fossil fuel industry.    “Allowing fossil fuel interests so much influence over the talks is deeply unacceptable. That dynamic needs to change if governments want their citizens to trust that they are doing as much as possible in these talks to address climate change.    “By the time we get to next year’s meeting in Lima, we urgently need to have political will, real commitments, and a clear path to a comprehensive and fair agreement in Paris 2015, where a new global agreement on climate change has to be signed.    Heads of state will need to come to the UN Leaders’ Summit called by the Secretary General next September with new commitments that match the scientific evidence of climate change. Heads of state also will need to engage directly in the negotiation process going forward, especially in Lima and Paris, if that’s what it takes.”    Tasneem Essop, WWF’s head of delegation at COP19 said:    “In Warsaw, WWF joined a broad front of civil society organizations, social movements and trade unions to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ We are committed to mobilizing our members and supporters to put pressure on governments to take more concrete actions on climate change.    As COP19 comes to a close, we are joining our civil society colleagues in making the following requests to the incoming COP Presidents, Peru and France:    Concrete steps to address pre 2020 ambition and an equitable agreement for 2015. An end to all dirty corporate sponsorship of UNFCCC climate talks. A guarantee of the right to freedom of expression and active participation by civil society organisations in the climate talks.    http://wwf.panda.org/?212630/Last-chance-change-needed-for-climate-negotiations-in-Lima-2014    Lack of ambition leaves world’s poorest people facing climate catastrophe, says CARE International.    Against the backdrop of super typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, severe floods in Vietnam and stark new warnings from climate scientists, key governments are still failing to tackle the growing climate crisis, aid organisation CARE International says.    The UN climate talks in Warsaw (COP19), which ended today, have been overshadowed by a serious lack of ambition from host country Poland to address both its reliance on coal and the apparent associated influence of the fossil fuel lobby on Poland"s approach to the talks, frustrating ambition and trust amongst countries CARE says.    CARE Secretary General Robert Glasser said: “Governments are leaving Warsaw with little progress to avert the climate crisis which is increasingly impacting the lives of millions of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Rising sea levels, melting glaciers and increasingly extreme and erratic weather events are undermining development and trapping people in a permanent state of emergency. Perversely, the world’s poorest people have done the least to cause climate change but are also bearing the highest costs; this is a grave social injustice which requires urgent action right now on the part of rich nations. There is no excuse for inaction or further delay.”    Sven Harmeling, CARE International’s Climate Change Advocacy Coordinator, said: “These talks demonstrate that a few key wealthy countries can slow down tangible progress to tackle climate change. The failure of these countries to understand and react to the true gravity of the situation facing the world inflicts increasing risks and impacts on vulnerable developing countries and their people. In particular, key developed countries have; backtracked on previous commitments to reduce emissions and failed to provide the necessary confidence to developing countries that sufficient finance for ambitious climate action will be made available.    Such behaviour has consistently undermined the talks by creating an atmosphere of mistrust and low ambition. This has contributed to stripping out and watering down the roadmap towards a new robust climate agreement in 2015 by some developed countries and a number of powerful developing countries.    There are, however, some glimmers of hope:    Developing countries have sent a strong message of unity by standing together in the face of much pressure to consistently call for an ‘international mechanism’ to address loss and damage from climate change impacts. The spirit of compromise from many countries has resulted in the establishment of the new "Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts." This is a significant step forward to begin to address the issue of loss and damage but is yet to be transformed into a strong and meaningful mechanism.    Some European countries have pledged additional finance to fund climate change adaptation, however the funds are still only a drop in the ocean compared to what"s required for effective adaptation in developing countries.    Sven Harmeling says: “We need to see a rapid rebuilding of trust between all governments and significantly increased commitment to tackle the climate crisis. This includes a collective spirit to agree emissions reductions that ensure global warming is limited to below 1.5 degrees as quickly as possible. If not, the world will collectively fail to protect the world’s poorest people from the growing climate catastrophe.”    “CARE urgently calls on all governments to get serious about climate change - as the costs of inaction are unthinkable. We can’t let the planet or these climate negotiations descend into chaos. If countries don’t urgently step up their ambition ahead of Ban Ki-moon’s high-level summit next year, and COP20 in Peru, the chances of achieving a meaningful climate deal by 2015 and avoiding dangerous climate change are looking increasingly unlikely. There is still a lot of work to do activate climate colleagues in civil society and national governments to work together to achieve higher levels of collective action.”    US and China must act on climate change rhetoric, says German minister, by Josie Le Blond in Berlin.    The US and China need to put their rhetoric on climate change into practice, the German environment minister, Peter Altmaier, said on Monday after United Nations climate change negotiations in Warsaw failed to reach agreement in key areas.    Disappointed by the lack of significant breakthroughs, Altmaier demanded concrete action on climate change from bigger industrialised nations ahead of a crunch meeting in Paris in 2015.    "China and the US will have to take a position at some point. Both President Obama and the new Chinese leadership have said they will prioritise climate protection, but that has to become visible in practice," he said, and demanded both nations set binding national climate targets as soon as possible.    "It"s there [in the US and China] where the largest C02 emissions are produced, it"s there where we have to achieve something in the coming months," added Altmaier.    During the conference, regional German environment ministers wrote a letter appealing to chancellor, Angela Merkel, to push for an EU-wide C02 reduction target of 55% by 2030 as an impulse for key nations such as China to make their "own essential contributions" to global climate negotiations.    Muted reaction also came from German negotiators frustrated by the lack of agreement between industrialised nations. "We reached an agreement in the end. I think it was a sign that after the big crisis in these negotiations we still reached a compromise," said Karsten Sach, head of the German delegation.    Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) were among NGOs that walked out of the negotiations last Thursday in protest against what they saw as stalling tactics by the world"s biggest polluters.    "The climate conference in Warsaw was a waste of energy," said Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace Germany. "It was already clear by midweek that small steps forward would be sold as successes but would not help us to negotiate a global climate protection agreement by 2015."    http://climatedesk.org/ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change    November 21, 2013    Saying "polluters talk, we walk," hundreds of individuals representing civil society walked out of the UN climate conference in Warsaw (COP19) on Thursday, denouncing the summit as putting corporate profits above people and being "on track to deliver virtually nothing."    Among the civil society groups represented in the walkout are Oxfam International, Greenpeace, ActionAid, Friends of the Earth International, the International Trade Union Confederation and 350.org.    “Polluters and corporations dominated this conference with their empty talk, so we walked out in protest. Polluters talk, we walk,” stated Jagoda Munic, Chairperson of Friends of the Earth International.    "By walking out of COP19," added 350"s Jamie Henn, "we’re walking into a fight with the real enemies to progress: the coal, oil and gas companies that have a stranglehold over our governments and economy."    “While people around the world are paying with their lives and livelihoods, and the risk of runaway climate change draws closer, we simply could not sit by this egregious inaction. Corporate profits should not come before peoples" lives,” stated Munic.    The walkout is the second to hit the conference in as many days. On Wednesday, over 130 of the world"s developing nations, including the G77 nations and China, walked out, accusing the wealthiest nations, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan and the EU states of derailing deals on reparations owed from their massive fossil fuel emissions.    In a joint statement issued Thursday, the environmental groups charged that COP19 "is on track to deliver virtually nothing" and "has put the interests of dirty energy industries over that of global citizens."    "We as civil society are ready to engage with ministers and delegations who actually come to negotiate in good faith. But at the Warsaw Conference, rich country governments have come with nothing to offer. Many developing country governments are also struggling and failing to stand up for the needs and rights of their people. It is clear that if countries continue acting in this way, the next two days of negotiations will not deliver the climate action the world so desperately needs".    Therefore, organizations and movements representing people from every corner of the Earth have decided that the best use of our time is to voluntarily withdraw from the Warsaw climate talks. Instead, we are now focusing on mobilizing people to push our governments to take leadership for serious climate action. We will work to transform our food and energy systems at a national and global level and rebuild a broken economic system to create a sustainable and low-carbon economy with decent jobs and livelihoods for all. And we will put pressure on everyone to do more to realize this vision".    Youth climate activist Anjali Appadurai, who made headlines at the COP17 climate conference in Durban with a moving speech demanding urgent action, spoke to Democracy Now! on the sidelines of the conference.    "The message is about social movements," Appadurai said. "We"re going back, we"re building up our networks and our movements and we"re coming back much stronger in Peru [for the next COP] ready to re-engage in the political process."    "We have this message: volveremos—we will be back."    “We’re going to bring back social movements as an essential part of this process so that COP20 next year in Lima can be stronger because of the social movements lighting a fire underneath it,” Appadurai said.    “We are calling on developed countries to go back home and listen to their own people," urged Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth International Climate Justice and Energy coordinator. "People all over the world demand urgent steps to agree an ambitious, binding and equitable international agreement on climate change.    The people that took part in the walkout were right to do so to "raise the profile" of the urgency of the climate problem—something that"s not happening at sessions within the summit, said Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, two scientists calling for "radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the U.S., EU and other wealthy nations."    Speaking to Democracy Now!, Bows-Larkin said, "I think that it’s important that if the scientists and the science is not being adhered to or listened to, and that there is frustration, I think those people who are in those civil society organizations need to make a stand and to raise the profile."    "Civil society are trying to raise the profile, the fact that, you know, this is a huge and an urgent problem," she continued. "And actually, you would not get that sort of message from the negotiations, that it’s urgent at all. You know, you get the sense that really we can, you know, wait a while, and at some point we will sort some targets out. Well, it’s, frankly, going to be too late. And it’s—you know, not setting any targets before 2015 means it will be too late to avoid a two-degree target, because emissions are supposed to have globally reached a peak by then. Well, of course, they can’t reach a peak if we don’t have a target."    At the conference last week, Philippines lead negotiator Yeb Sańo wondered if he must put forth the same questions he asked at last year"s COP in Doha: "If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?"    For the green groups calling who walked out in protest, the answer couldn"t be more clear. "Now is the time to break free from our fossil fuel addiction and start a transformation towards sustainable and just societies,” said Bhatnagar.    http://climatedevlab.org/2013/11/27/corporate-influences-silence-voices-demanding-progress-at-warsaws-cop19/#more-820 Visit the related web page
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