Global Power Shift
Istanbul, 27 June 2013
Statement by
Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change
Good morning to all of you. It’s
wonderful to be here. I am honoured by being allowed to come and I want to
thank Daniel for two things:
1. That you led the singing because
if Kumi or I had done it, there would’ve been no melody; and
2. Thank you for calling me an
“elder”.
I had a grandfather who had white
hair since he was 25 and my aspiration has always been to have white hair. So,
the fact that I’m getting white hair makes me delighted. Being called an elder
is actually very exciting, so thank you very much!
I am grateful to Juan, your Peruvian
colleague, who was chosen to introduce me. There are no coincidences in life.
Juan not only leads the GPS movement in Latin America, he comes from the
country that is going to be the host of a most important COP.
Why do I say that? Because COP 2014
is the COP that you all have to have in mind. It’s not 2015. Let me tell you
why. Because it’s at COP 2014 in Lima Peru that governments are going to put a
draft agreement on the table.
If there’s anything I want you to
remember about what I say today, it is that 2014 needs to be the milestone for
which you plan. Please do not plan for 2015. If you plan for 2015, you are too
late. We are not going to redo Copenhagen. We are going to have a very
different strategy. We have to put all our effort into getting a draft agreement
by 2014.
But now let me share with you my
vision of the engagement you need to have in the battle against climate change.
It is a vision for your generation, because I think of you every single day,
believe it or not. I think about you because I have two daughters your same
age, and they have the same fears and the same hopes that you do. That’s why I
do the work that I do. I don’t do it for the elders. I do it for you.
When I think of you, I think of you
as “Generation C”, generation “Climate”. You are the generation that is going
to feel the most impacts from climate change. But, if we do our work right, you
are also the generation that potentially will benefit the most from the
transformations that we must have in society to address climate change.
You stand in a very interesting
confluence. You will suffer from climate impacts because the atmosphere is
already loaded against your generation and we are now just working to avoid
worse impacts. But if we do our work right, you will benefit from a transformation
in the energy sector that is very similar to the benefits from the revolution
in the telecommunication industry.
None of you will remember the first cell phone
that was put out 30 years ago. It weighed 3 pounds and was called “the brick”.
It was literally a brick. It took ten hours to load it. It could work for 30
minutes and then you had to load it again for ten hours, and you could only
transmit voice. Now, the cell phones that you have do everything except cook
your dinner
The kind of transformation we had in
the telecommunication sector is what we must have in the energy sector. The
energy sector, except for some recent innovations in renewable energy, has had
no real transformation in the past 30 years. It absolutely must be transformed,
and you stand to benefit from that.
But the path is not an easy one. Your
generation has three ways of engaging on climate change: Voice, Choice and
Poise. These are not necessary sequential, but they could be. They are not
necessarily mutually exclusive, but they could be. Some of you may choose to
work on one, or the other. Or you may choose to work on all three at different
points in your life. Let me present them in what I think is an increasing level
of difficulty.
VOICE. The first is the work that you
are doing here, now. I call that the work of voice. That has to do with getting
your voice heard and building a nonviolent civil movement. I am truly grateful
to 350.org, Greenpeace and all of the other organizations that are giving you
the tools to build a climate movement. I still don’t understand why we do not
have people in the streets every single day in every single capital
demonstrating to get more urgent responses to climate. It is the most critical
issue we all face.
All of you know already much more
than I do about building a movement. And, I’m very grateful that you are
dedicating your time, your hearts and your brains to building this movement,
which has to be built urgently. The more we delay, the more impacts you are
going to have.
CHOICE. The second type of the work
is exercise the power of choice. By choice I mean exercise the power that you
have as educated consumers. Don’t put up with high-carbon products. The best
way to get to low-carbon living is to demand that every single product you buy
be labelled to show carbon intensity. When we buy food, we know about the
nutritional content in the food by the label. Why don’t we know how much carbon
has gone into everything that we buy?
We must insist on labelling. We must
insist on the transparency of the carbon intensity of production. We as
consumers, and you as a generation that has the purchasing power that you do,
you are the ones that have to demand that low-carbon become the norm. You need
to insist that every single thing you buy is labelled with respect to its
carbon footprint so that you can make informed choices, and industry can cater
to your choice of low-carbon. We can’t afford to buy indiscriminately anymore.
Frankly we will all continue to consume in some measure, but we should consume
consciously. You are the generation with the future purchasing power that can
force production to be transparent about its carbon footprint, and to be
low-carbon.
Thirdly, the most difficult work:
POISE (for lack of a better word that almost rhymes with voice and choice!) By
poise I mean the need to stay calm and focused in the face of pressure. As you
get ready to take over the responsibility of taking decisions for our society
you will face many pressures. In order to stay calm and focused you need to
understand where the pressures come from. This is the most difficult part of
the work that you will need to do because it requires thorough understanding.
You will need to understand what is
behind the very powerful triangle of policy, technology and finance. The
interaction of policy, technology and finance is at the bottom of the
transformation we seek, but is also at the base of the resistance to the
change. If you really want to make a difference, you need to understand the
policies that will bring about the transformation, as well as the difficulties,
the barriers, to implementing those policies.
You need to understand the
technologies that can take us forward and what are the difficulties of those
technologies. You need to understand which are the financial instruments that
are most powerful for each of these policies and technologies and what are
their barriers. And once you understand these three very clearly, then you need
to understand who are the winners and who are the losers in this
transformation.
Because there will be winners who
will be your allies, but there will be losers who will put much resistance and
will want change to be impossible. You need to understand where the resistance
is going to come from so you’re prepared for it. So you that you can remain
focused in the face of pressure, and still push on for change.
Now here is the surprise. Once you fully
understand the interplay of policy, technology and finance, plus the politics
surrounding them, then you cannot allow that to limit or stop you. You need to
understand that the history that we have all built together is very valuable as
a lesson, but it does not determine the future. You can learn from it, but you
need to go beyond it.
You need to determine the future. You
need to decide what is possible not based only on what has been possible in the
past. You need to decide what is going to be possible for you, and that is very
different from what was possible for me. You are gathering the tools you need
to move into the positions of taking the societal decisions that you want to
take, that you can take and that you must take. Don’t shy away from that
responsibility. Get ready to act with poise and determination, because
generations after you are depending on you.
If we’re not able to stand and say
from the bottom of our hearts, “I did everything that I could,” then we have no
moral integrity. And, I know that you are here because you are motivated by
your moral integrity.
I thank you for that.
- - - - -
The simplest way to combat climate change is to plant trees:
Trees breathe in Carbon di-oxide and
through the process of photo-synthesis create food for themselves and breathe
out Oxygen.
Plant or gift a tree today:
As
simple as it sounds, planting a tree
makes a difference.
A tree has the potential to sequester about a ton of carbon over 50 years. What's more, It generates enough oxygen for two human beings for their lifetimes.Any which way you look at it. You are cleansing your air and making up for the carbon that you unintentionally emit.
A tree has the potential to sequester about a ton of carbon over 50 years. What's more, It generates enough oxygen for two human beings for their lifetimes.Any which way you look at it. You are cleansing your air and making up for the carbon that you unintentionally emit.
Plant
a tree today.
Banking details: to deposit transfer funds
Sustainable Green Initiative
Axis Bank
Current A/c 9130*2001*163*2543
BD Block Salt Lake Branch, Kolkata, India
IFSC Code UTIB 0000025
and send us your planting request at