A LACK of proper leadership in next month’s climate change talks at Copenhagen would mean the end of the liveable world, former president Mary Robinson said yesterday.
Mrs Robinson was speaking in Trinity College Dublin last night as honorary president of Oxfam International at an event organised by Oxfam Ireland and Trinity International Development Initiative. She described the negotiations towards Copenhagen as “disheartening” as they were being played out “like a poker game” or world trade talks.
“It matters if a trade agreement is reached, but it is not the end of the world. If we don’t get proper leadership at Copenhagen, soon it will be end of the liveable world; it’s as serious as that,” she said.
It was very important that a sufficiently precise framework was reached, she said. As this would lead to a binding agreement at a ministerial meeting in Mexico in December 2010.
US president Barack Obama’s signal that he would definitely go to Copenhagen sent a strong signal that it is important to the US, she said.
She said the EU needed to go beyond reducing CO2 emissions by 30 per cent by 2020.
All governments needed to be more honest because they were going further on the climate change issue at home than they were in Copenhagen, she said.
She connected climate change to the recent floods in Ireland.
It was “heartbreaking” to see people’s homes flooded in recent floods but it was part of the future for which Ireland had to learn coping mechanisms, she said.
She placed the pain and loss of these Irish families in the context of the impact of climate change in developing countries where people have no insurance and no way of coping other than resilience.
Climate change threatens progress in developing countries, she said. While commitments have been made to support developing countries to reach the millennium development goals, climate impacts on and retards this progress, she said. The impact of climate change for the next generation also concerned Mrs Robinson.
“I find myself thinking that my grandchildren will be in their 40s in 2050 and I don’t know if it will be a liveable world.”
