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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS