Copenhagen blog 11: Breakfast in Roskilde

David Johnstone, WDM south-west London group member, writes from Copenhagen

You can't walk far in Copenhagen without being reminded that the conference is in town. Virtually every billboard makes a claim of environmental virtue.

At Norreport Station, one of the city's main transport interchanges, advertisements for Danish wind energy company Vestas plastered all over the walls proclaim them the planet's saviours. The workers laid off when they closed their factory on the Isle of Wight earlier this year may be able to give a fuller picture.

Around every corner there's a climate-themed art work of dubious merit, a rock concert, or a film crew asking you for your 'message of hope' as a citizen of 'Hopenhagen'. As a campaigning veteran of 'Make Poverty History' and Live 8, I'm suspicious of any campaign involving rock stars and you often don't have to look far to spot a corporate logo. The message about the global injustice of climate change is not always so easy to find, though.

We received our clearest picture of what's happening at the Bella Centre, not in the newspapers or public squares of Copenhagen, but 30 km out of town, in a basic motel on the outskirts of the town of Roskilde.

Accommodation in the city has been fully booked for many months, and being unwilling to take our chances with the crash spaces at school halls and social centres, we looked further afield when arranging our trip. This is how we came to find ourselves sharing breakfast with a team of forestry experts from across Africa hoping to participate in the conference and hear what they had to say about the world of international climate negotiations.

The fact that they're staying so far from the Bella Centre says much in itself about their access to the conference. I didn't check the motel register, but didn't see any signs of corporate lobbyists in residence. Perhaps they were all attending the 'Angry Mermaid' award ceremony.

Like most organisations at the conference, the African Forestry Forum had had their list of delegates slashed and those still accredited were finding little chance to be involved, with plenary sessions only scheduled for late in the day. So our breakfast companion was in no hurry and only too happy to answer our questions.

Though he was calm and measured in his tone, his anger at the injustice of climate change was clear. He told us there was no sign of any urgency among the negotiators from the rich countries, while across the global south, the emergency was well understood. His country, Tanzania, had already lost two islands and in his lifetime he had seen the snow covering of Mount Kilimanjaro recede dramatically.

He felt that politicians from rich countries, working on behalf of their corporations and private sector, were unwilling to contemplate any changes to western lifestyles, and showed little concern because they would be in old people's homes by the time any crisis reached them.

He contrasted the response to climate change with that to the financial crisis, pointing out that effectively tackling world poverty would need only a fraction of the sums devoted to bailing out the banks and that Africa had to suffer the effects of the financial crisis while being given lectures on governance and ethics from the rich countries, whose poor governance had created the crisis.

He believed there was little understanding of the impact climate change would have on the social cohesion of the planet, pointing out that those whose livelihoods would be destroyed 'would not die quietly', and posed the question "if your neighbours were throwing their trash in your back yard and they did nothing when you told them, would you sit quietly by and accept it?".

His hopes were with the youth of the planet, and he wished that the present generation of politicians would get out the way, so that those who would have to live with the effects of climate change could start making the decisions.

As WDM group members, we're aiming to campaign in solidarity with those from the global south and to hear their views first hand is powerful and inspiring. This chance meeting at breakfast has been maybe the most important moment of our trip.