Raised Voices

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Hi, my name's Vanessa Black and I live in eThekwini in South Africa. I just want to say that I don't think that carbon trading is a way for us to solve climate problems which is one of the most serious problems we face at the moment. We can't just try to trade out way out of this. We all have to take this a lot more seriously and start thinking about how our economies are structured, how our lives are structured. It's not just about each individual trying to save energy alone. It's about us all working together to live in a completely different way, where we're not relying on goods that are sent all over the world. Where we're not trading all over for things we could be growing in our own gardens or our backyard. It's about the way we plan our settlements. So that we're working and living and communicating with people around us, not completely isolated and then trading with people on the other side of the planet.

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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.

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We don't have a say in how they exploit the planet, we don't have say in how it's done. And if we did I think things would happen in a very different way. But there is this attitude that basically we've got to find a way to make these corporate entities nice. Some of these people that are running these companies are probably very nice people. But it's not because they are nasty that they do these horrific things to the environment, it's because it is highly profitable. And they get subsidised by you and I to actually make that profit. It's called development. That's what the name of the game is. I think we have to be really hard to say look let's look at why this is happening and it's happening because it is a profitable enterprise for people to exploit natural resources. I think a good example of the kind of contradictions people get into is this whole debate about carbon trading. It's absurd. Imagine if you said well okay this year New York only had X number of murders and in Nairobi they had Y number of murders. So Nairobi has under-killed this year so it can sell off how many people can be killed somewhere else. I mean it's absurd. It's not a system we can accept and I think some really hard talking needs to be done about this.

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I am from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance from South Africa. At present I'm concerned about carbon trading and climate justice because it's clear to us that Africans and the Third World countries in the South are going to pay to keep the rich countries of the North in their affluent ways.