Voice of voiceless is to be heard!
8 July 2011
Manjeet Dhakal
Clean Energy Nepal
Policy and Advocacy Officer/ Act. Program Director
Nepal
Regardless of whatever the outcome was Copenhagen was successful in making a historical gathering of a large number of participants among the UNFCCC COPs. On a freezing Copenhagen streets, people from around the world demonstrated and urged world leaders to limit developed country emissions and to compensate on their past actions. But a small group of powerful people inside the Bella Centre betrayed everyone by letting us down and to compromising our future. At that point, I remembered a slogan hung up during climate negotiation "Don't negotiate with our future". Science has already proven that human activity is the cause of the climate change problem through increased emissions of greenhouse gases in recent decades. And now I feel like, I have to pay the debt of my grandfather and my grandchildren will be taking even more burdens in the future. So, I just wonder what kind of world are we really planning to building?
Youth interventions at UNFCCC meetings always excite me. They often starts it with, "My name is _ _ and I am XX years of age and I will be YY years old in 2050". I have noticed timid expression with discomfort on the faces of many delegates who always evoke on false number of commitment for second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol and those who come to negotiation just for the weekend. I wonder what kind of world they have envisioned for the coming days?
Cancun was a milestone on climate change discourse; it has brought us hope that was merely drowned by Copenhagen results. But again, Cancun is not the end; rather it was a beginning of another chapter. The first page of this new chapter was flipped in Bangkok in April, which was not that encouraging and the next page at Bonn recently in June and again made everyone nervous. Now the question is how many Bonn, Bangkok and another COP do we need for an international climate treaty? It seems very difficult for developing countries to continue this endless discourse. In the recent Bonn meeting, around 100 countries had less than five delegates and 20 of them had only single delegates and these 20 were the most vulnerable countries. In these negotiations, where is the voice of those voiceless that are already badly suffering? On the other side, five major developed countries and around 100 developing countries have equal number of delegates. Now anyone can imagine the outcome and also the possibility of getting another treaty like Kyoto, which has real essence at least to be optimistic about.