Africa
Hi, my name is Siziwe Khanyile from South Africa. My position personally is that I don't believe that carbon trading is a solution for climate change. My opinion is that the World Bank should reduce funding to extractive industries and fossil fuel industries and focus on renewable energies to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the impact of climate change.
My name is Roy Nyer. I live in South Africa in South Durban where we are surrounded by large companies that pollute our area. I worked for Mondi for a period of twenty years. Mondi paper company that produces paper and newsprint. My concern is that two of my kids have been affected with sickness through the pollution. And on my investigation I found out that the company that I worked for for twenty years has been a contributing factor to the cause of my children's sickness. One of the reasons I believe that the industries have been built close to our community, predominantly an Indian community, is they've taken advantage of our passivity. We are a race that does not fight very aggressively. Whenever we want to bring our concerns, it's done very passively. This is the reason I believe that most of the industries have come and built their factories close to us because they would not get any violent reactions or violent protest. That's one of the reasons why they have built the company. The other reason is that we are poor. And they realised that as an Indian community that we always believed in family values. That our families would not let us lose our jobs. The companies knew that. Being poor, we would be scared of losing our jobs, so whatever they have done by polluting the area or causing any concern to our community, that we would not fight back. Because we're scared to lose out jobs and if we lose our jobs our families would suffer.
Hello my name is Muna Lakhani and I'm a black South African. I'd just like to share one or two thoughts about why many of us believe that nuclear power is no solution to climate change. Firstly it's a highly toxic environment that we would create for people for hundreds of thousands of years. And while it's true that the power plant doesn't generate much in the way of climate changing gases, the reality is that the life cycle of uranium actually generates an awful amount. Particularly mining, uranium enrichment and of course long-term disposal. It's also very expensive technology as far as energy is concerned. In the last fifty years of nuclear power in the USA shows that the energy generated by nuclear was only 20% of that which it consumed. It's overall a dead loss to the energy system. So we would rather go for our beautiful natural resources here in the warm South and use solar-thermal technologies, tidal waves, and all these human and development-benign technologies rather than the toxic wastes of nuclear development. Here's a clear message to everybody involved about sustainable development, about caring for people and planet, nuclear will never be the answer. Thank you.
I'm Prishani, I'm from South Africa. I work in the Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg basically struggling for free basic services. I think all of us in our different struggles are fighting against a common enemy – capitalism. I think for too long now we've been too separate in our struggles. We need to start seeing our common enemy and start coming together to fight in our different spaces and the different issues that face us directly.
