Raised Voices

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My name's Fiona, Scottish as you can tell by my accent. I live next to a petro-chemical industries. I have depression. If anyone knows anything about mental health, it affects one in four Scottish people sometime in their lives. It affects all your senses. It's very uncomfortable to live with such things. I'd just like you to take a few minutes to think of what it's like for people like myself who are on the ground level. Who have to live their lives 24/7 in such conditions. We have to eat, breathe, sleep, live, have our children, look after our grandmothers in this kind of situation. We've got constant pollution in our lungs at all times. Our children are playing in these areas. They're sleeping in all this rubbish that comes out of the plants. It really is very uncomfortable and to be honest a little bit unfair. You can all walk away to your nice areas and we're stuck with it on our very doorsteps, literally our doorsteps. The pollution is smelly, very uncomfortable. You've got to have dark curtains at night time because you can't block out the light from light pollution. You've got smells. And there's nothing you can do. You can put as much air freshener as you want into your sitting room but you just can not get rid of the smell. You're stuck with it. So I'd just like you to take a few moments to yourselves, whether it be now or sometime in the future when you're thinking about your carbon trade and all your great ideas. Just think of the people on the ground who have to eat, sleep and breathe pollution of three different types. Thank you for your time.

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My name is Desmond Desai. I'm from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance in South Africa. We are concerned in South Africa that the major multinational corporations are continuously dumping their toxic chemicals with impunity on poor communities who are living on their fenceline.

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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.

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My name is Atossa Soltani. I work for a US-based organisation that is working South America to defend Indigenous peoples rights and to protect the Amazon Basin. In fact the Amazon Basin is vital to protect the Earth's climate. It is one of the planet's life support systems and it regulates the world climate. In fact we, through our fossil fuel consumption and our search for fossil fuels, are dismembering and destroying this vital ecosystem.

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So while everyone's talking about how to reduce carbon emissions, what is not being talked about is basically the oil industry and the fossil fuel industry spending upwards of 300 billion US dollars a year looking for new fossil fuel reserves. When we can not afford to burn the reserves we already have found. This is happening in far remote places on the Earth and having huge consequences on the people and fragile ecosystems. Meanwhile 300 billion dollars a year is money that should be going into promoting solutions to climate change. Also looking at alternatives, efficiency, basically ways we are going to cope with our changing planet.