Full feedElephants and piggy banks: the money on the table to stop global warming
Cindy Baxter reports:
I am here in Bangkok at the latest round of climate talks, and my head is full of elephants.
Firstly, there are the five elephants that, with Greenpeace activists from across South East Asia and beyond, have just completed a 15-day, 250km trek through Thailand to highlight forest destruction. The Chang(e) caravan which trekked through the villages, forests and along coastlines, engaging with thousands of people along the way. (Chang means elephant in Thai)
Greenpeace/Athit Perawongmetha
Then there’s the five little piggybank elephants, filled during the trek with “small change” collected from the people they met – people who gave whatever they could spare to help protect their forests. It’s not as though they HAVE change to spare – this region has been described as one of the world’s most vulnerable and least able to cope with the impacts of climate change. But they gave it anyway.
And at the moment, all the money on the table to save the climate by saving forests is in those piggy banks. The elephants and the people who donated have done more than the G20, the G8, or the European Union on this issue.
Five children, aged between four and eight, delivered the little piggybank elephants this morning to the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boers in front of the world’s media, asking him to help stop climate change and to save their forests.
Yvo was so taken with the piggybanks that, he put one on the podium at the opening ceremony.
Yvo de Boers (left) puts money on the table for forest protection.
There sat the little grey elephant, in front of world governments, with its little “Change” message around its neck, while the speeches went on around it. It will, we’re told, stay throughout the next two weeks.
It might not have noticed the other elephants in the room this morning.
The fact that the money he and his four pals contained is the only money on the table so far to help people in regions like South East Asia to deal with the impacts of climate change.
Look only at the 500,000 in Manila who lost their homes in the massive storm over the weekend – which dumped a month’s worth of rain in just six hours – more than Hurricane Katrina. Colleagues from the Philippines can’t get hold of friends who live there – they have no idea if they’re ok.
Storms like this are what climate change looks like - this region is likely to get more of in the coming years if nothing is done.
The developed world nations have promised to help these countries cope, but they haven’t come up with a single baht, peso or cent so far.
There are other elephants too… like the pathetic emissions cuts promised by these countries … like the US Administration’s incredibly weak target – and then there’s the fact that nobody appears to be listening to the science.
The impacts of climate change wait for nobody and they are starting to bite.
I only hope that by the time we get to the climate summit in Copenhagen, it won’t be this little grey elephant and the people across the developing world who have to carry their burden alone.
