16 December 2009

News from the inside

Talking to Prince Charles at the COP15 

Prince Charles is a long time supporter of our work and last night we got a chance to talk to him at a Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership event. You can see the video below.

The Prince had just addressed the Copenhagen Summit saying that "Human exploitation of the Earth's resources has pushed it to the brink and the planet has reached a point of crisis that can only be resolved with global action"

There was the usual long line of people for him to meet at the reception afterwards. Andy Atkins, Director of Friends of the Earth UK was there and while we waited we asked Andy for the latest inside info. The country pledges currently add up to 18% cuts by 2020 which would put us on target for a 4C rise by the end of the century. We need 40% cuts by 2020. So obviously nowhere near good enough. You can follow the latest on what the pledges add up to on Climate Interactive. Andy told us that it is essential that four major loopholes are closed off in the talks. He said FoE's research shows that these loopholes could add to a 10C rise by 2020. I said well make sure you tell Prince Charles then!  Which he did... We all hovered with cameras taking photos of each other as we spoke to Charles. I got one of Andy looking impassioned and one of our friend Matt Mellen from Mayday Network looking smooth. Matt got some video of us talking to the Prince which you can see below. Prince Charles agreed that solutions are really important, he said he is inspired by people who start things like BioRegional.

It's possible to achieve high level star spotting points and networking here. Pooran and I chatted to actress and climate activist Daryl Hannah and told her about our work. She said she would love to do a video blog about the communities and Pooran gave her a copy of his new book One Planet Communities. You can see Ban Ki-Moon and all the politicians like Ed Miliband and his entourage strolling by. Jennie and I went to hear Arnie speak.

Yesterday we passed Achim Steiner, Director of UNEP twice in the corridor. We know Achim and stopped and chatted for a while as we have been trying to get a meeting with him here. He is so busy it's just not been possible but the good thing is he said let's schedule something for "after this deluge". One of our trustees and author of the book The Ecology of Health, Robin Stott is sitting here with us in the cafe and he said he thought this was a famous reference to the french revolution.

We got here so early today to make sure we could get in that I managed to get one of just 100 NGO tickets to go to the main high level negotiations. Jennie found out the ticket seems to be transferable so we are taking it in turns to attend. Today is probably the last day we will be able to get in to the Bella Centre because they are cutting entrance from 7,000 to 1,000 NGOs tomorrow. So we will carry on networking as hard as we can. We had heard last week that today's the day that activists plan to storm the Bella Centre. Freya is at our stand at the Klima Forum - the people's climate summit, and she says it is strangely quiet there right now...

Sue Riddlestone
Executive Director and co-founder