Building up to Copenhagen

A one year journey to Copenhagen

2 December 2009

A small team from BioRegional are going to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference today. Our train leaves London at 2.30pm, but for me the journey to Copenhagen started just over a year ago.

I’m also a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project and was invited to a briefing to hear the latest climate science first hand from the IPCC in October 2008. It was bad. They said the latest science shows that the climate is more sensitive than previously thought and we are on a trajectory for a 7C rise by the end of the century - off the scale of the worst IPCC projections. The most shocking news was when an audience member asked if they agreed with NASA scientist James Hansen’s work that year which showed that the limit of carbon in the atmosphere should be 350ppm. We are already at 387ppm. IPCC scientist Jean-Pascal van-Ypersele said yes, although we have never modelled carbon levels as low as that. Try Jean-Pascal’s climate model here: http://www.climate.be/jcm. The whole room went really quiet as everyone realised we are no longer trying to avoid reaching some ceiling or limit, we’d already exceeded it. I’ve had climate trauma ever since.
 
How depressing you might say, but read on. If there is one thing we do at BioRegional it’s a bit of “yes we can”.  Jurgen le Fevre, the EU Climate negotiator also spoke at the Al Gore event. He said I need some compelling materials showing what our low carbon future will look like. This will help me to convince the politicians and will help the politicians to convince the voters. Luckily, creating real-life examples of our low carbon, one planet future is what we do. So that’s why we are going to Copenhagen. Have a look at our brochure which provides real life case studies from around the world.

By the way, if you want to get the train instead of the plane in Europe let the Man in Seat 61 make it easy for you.

Sue Riddlestone, executive director & co-founder, BioRegional

Part of a social experiment at the Climate Conference

3 December 2009

We came for the Climate Change Conference but we have found we are also part of a social experiment. New Life Copenhagen http://www.newlifecopenhagen.com is organised by www.wooloo.org. They asked Danish families if they would open their homes to climate guests and have managed to find 3,000 willing hosts. New Life Copenhagen is an arts project and social experiment of which they say “if it works will be a powerful act to teach and remind us that the basis for sustainability is collectivity. And that life can be lived differently if we want it to be.”

Before we left the UK we had exchanged brief e-mails. As we are here for two weeks we will be staying with two different families in succession. It all seemed very friendly but I didn’t really think much about how unusual it was at the time. I was too busy trying to get all my work done before I went away. I failed of course!  Hayley Bell and I arrived at 10am in Copenhagen central station and then went our separate ways to find our host families. Inger Stauning, my host, had e-mailed me ahead with very good instructions on how to reach the nearest station and she said if you call I will pick you up. We hit it off straight away. Inger is a 70’s feminist who co-founded Copenhagen’s first hostel for battered women. She is an engineer, has a PhD and four children. Inger is now a lecturer in sustainability at the university who has taken up singing and painting since her children have grown up. What a woman!

Inger opened a parcel from New Life. It had a “guest book” which she gave me. Inger has a host book. I had to rush of to join my colleagues to run some workshops at the Climate Exchange but took it with me. I came back for dinner with Inger and her 25 year old son Victor. He was busy studying for a maths exam, but the table was cleared of paperwork and equations for Inger’s climate friendly dinner of rice steamed in one pot with onions and beetroot plus some meat and gravy. I have noticed that the Danes eat a lot of meat and don’t have many vegan or veggie options when eating out.

Over dinner we got to talking about sustainability. From what I know of the Danes, they seem really green, cycle a lot and are community minded, so I can’t understand why their carbon footprint is so high. Inger explained she thinks it is because people are equal and are all quite well off in Denmark. Also she thinks they have too many electrical appliances.

I went to meet my work colleagues Hayley, Jennie and Freya and we looked at the guest book from New Life. Most of it is a questionnaire with what must be two hundred questions which are obviously designed to take you out of your comfort zone and make you think. I am supposed to fill this in. Here are four of the questions. They don’t really do justice to it, but this is meant to be a blog not an essay!
“Would you rather have; more time, more money or more skills?”
“What is your biggest fear in life?”
“Find an item in the home of your host which you find strange”
“Do you believe in public suicide as part of a demonstration?”

We enjoyed some of the questions but found others pretty distasteful. We thought we spend a lot of time trying to counter the impression the mainstream has of environmentalists and this sort of thing might just reinforce it. Inger told me later she thought it was a bit crazy and she wasn’t sure she would fill it in.

But leaving aside some of the flaky questions, there is a kernel of truth in the New Life Copenhagen experiment. I have seen it standing out so clearly in our work. In the end achieving, or worse not achieving, sustainability is going to be down to human behaviour and we are not logical. Let’s hope science and logic triumphs over human nature at Copenhagen in the next two weeks. Then, after that if we are to have a hope of actually achieving the carbon reductions and sustainable resource use we need, the most important professionals in the world might turn out to be the psychologists.

Sue Riddlestone, executive director & co-founder, BioRegional

Is Denmark really green?

4 December 2009

We are part way through the first day of the Copenhagen Climate Exchange (a sort of COP15 for the public) where we have been getting visitors to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions and find out more about their eco-impact. Response has been good and we even got the former Danish Environment Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, to pledge - he pledged to “get an electric car as soon as it is feasible”. However, when we were researching the Danish ecological footprint we were somewhat surprised to find that it is massive! - a per capita ecofootprint of 8.1 hectares - not far off of the USA and United Arab Emirates.

Some of the Danish people that we speak to think the Danish government has been doing a good PR job of making Denmark look like a green country when it’s actually not. Although you can’t deny that Denmark does have some good results – 20% percent of its energy production comes from wind power (significantly more than any other country) and the public transport system in Copenhagen is very efficient and convenient, and the fantastic cycling infrastructure makes the bike a very popular option.

We ran a ‘call for action’ workshop today with the visitors. We asked them what they thought world leaders should do to stop climate change, particularly focusing on how they can help individuals and communities – ‘more support for public transport’ was a very popular call. We are running these work shops over the four days of The Exchange and will present the most popular calls to Denmark’s Environment Minister, Connie Hedgard, at the closing ceremony on Sunday to help show that the people are behind her and the other world leaders to make big carbon cuts.

Of course there is a big eco-impact from all the people who are travelling to Copenhagen for the conference and surrounding events. As a charity we always try to practise what we preach so we took the train and we are couch surfing with Danish hosts. I am staying with a very hospitable dreadlocked chap called Ingolf and my BioRegional colleagues have found their hosts to be equally welcoming. Ingolf is not a fan of the new laws that have been passed to deal with the possible protester issues that may arise later on in the Conference, he thinks they are very heavy handed and are unpopular – one lady said that the one thing that will really stop any trouble is bad weather! – I was told that it rained for 27 out of 30 days here in November so maybe that will be the case!

At the moment there is a nice low-level buzz about COP-15 in Copenhagen but I think these chilled out Danes are going to get a shock; come Monday this place is going to liven up!

Jennie Organ, communications manager

Trains: good for the environment - bad for my back…

4 December 2009

Hayley here, coming to you live from Copenhagen. This is my second day in Copenhagen – I arrived yesterday morning after a mere 20 hour train journey: London – Brussels – Cologne – Copenhagen. I’d love to say it was a wonderful trip with gorgeous scenery but I’m not going to lie to you, in truth it was only daylight for all of three hours and when we weren’t on a train we were stuck in cold draughty train station trying to find somewhere to sit down that didn’t require us to buy yet another cup of tea or more cake. The sleeper train wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury (we went for the cheapest 6-berth option, there were more luxurious cabins) although according to Sue I didn’t wake up when passport control did their rounds so I guess I did get some sleep.

Having said all that, I wouldn’t have it any other way and I did get some quiet reading time. Taking the train is the right thing to do and maybe 20 hrs is how long it should take to get from London to Copenhagen. I hope more people follow our lead although I’ve not exactly done a great job of selling it to you.

At the Climate Exchange we’ve had a lot of pledges already – the best being ‘I will take more showers with my boyfriend – to save on hot water of course’. No name against that one. With the Danes’ love of meat, their pledges to cut down on meat consumption seem to dominate the pledge wall. So at least the locals recognise food’s high impact but at the moment seem to be more inclined to swap their beef for turkey rather than going vegetarian. The restaurant we were at last night was very nice and quite cosy and local with a good view of the fireworks over at the Christmas Market (and yes, there was a short debate about the carbon impacts of fireworks but we quickly concluded that ‘per capita’ emissions from the ‘consumption’ of fireworks can’t be that bad as thousands of people watch and take pleasure from the displays. Feel free to prove me wrong!) Anyway, the restaurant had a special climate-friendly menu which was based on locally sourced foods, still not meat free but apparently the mallards are wild. We of course opted for vegetarian dishes, there wasn’t anything vegan which put an end to Jennie’s day of trying very hard to be a low-carbon vegan in Denmark!

I was interviewed by the Conference organisers today about what we are doing here, see my video below…

Hayley Bell, sustainable business manager

BioRegional’s Copenhagen blogs are also available on the charity’s website

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