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.”

The director of energy programs for Washington think-tank, The Institute of Policy Studies, Janet Redman said at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries had promised to provide $A28.3billion to get fast-track mitigation projects in developing countries.

'' That money was meant to build trust and as as stop-gap until the institutions were ready to deliver the far greater sums necessary in the long-run. Recent reports show that developed countries have committed to only about half of that,'' Dr Redman said.

To understand the implications of the conference’s outcome, the Prospect spoke to Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, who is in Bonn for the negotiations.

What are the expected goals of the conference in Bonn? We’re now one week into the talks—how have they played out thus far?

The major battle that’s being waged here is, will we see the Kyoto Protocol move forward? Or, will we see it being undermined and gutted and instead see a whole different process, where it would be more of a pledge-and-review process? That’s what the U.S. is really pushing. That means that every country says what it thinks it can do based on its own national circumstances. Basically, “I think I can reduce my emissions by this much.” You hope that it totals what the science is calling for. And you review them at a later date.