Sustainable Energy and Economy Network

Though she spends her career worrying about the ruination of the planet, she has always tried to shield her 11-year-old son from the worst of her fears. “It’s more important to let a child be a child,” she writes. “Let them experience the wonder and beauty of nature, not fear it.”

"Climate change has begun," Wysham said. "And yet our press is not discussing extreme weather events - droughts, fires, flooding - in the context of climate change, so the populace is ill-informed. And our politicians are not connecting the dots between our continued reliance on carbon-intensive fuels - like tar sands - and the crazy weather that threatens us all. Both need to change."

"From computer models, we know that this part of the continent is hit by more extreme events than other regions," says Daphne Wysham, a climate analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She calls the Horn of Africa the "epicenter of global warming." She says that additional periods of extreme drought are to be expected in coming years.

Janet Redman, Institute for Policy Studies, observer NGO of the April meeting, stated “the GCF conversation shifted very quickly to leverage, to private funding. The World Bank uses leverage. The concern is that the financialization realm might be separated from the greenhouse emissions reductions aspect. So in a worst case scenario, you have none of the regulation and all of the speculation.” The problem with financialization, she underscored, is that “once you use financial intermediaries, a lot of the accountability and transparency disappears. The intermediaries are basically a black box.”