International Climate Change Conference Bonn, Germany July 21st 2001
Briefing papers: Poorer countries of the South

You are a delegation sent by the poorer countries of the South. You are only observers at this conference. That means that you can watch what's going on but you are not allowed to say anything, however desperately you want to! However, when there is a break between sessions, you can have meetings with anyone you like (provided they will listen to you). You want to get your point of view across, so you have to listen very carefully to find out what the different delegations are saying. You need to know who might be your allies at this conference.

You are really the group who are most worried about global warming - after all you have already suffered from some of the extreme weather events which have happened over the last few years and you do not have the money to properly protect your populations from them.

Amongst your delegation are representatives from Central America, which a few years ago saw a terrible hurricane which killed 10 000 people in floods and mudslides. It made hundreds of thousands of people homeless and destroyed the land they grew their crops on.

Also among your delegation is a representative from India, which only recently has seen a terrible flood which swept away over 10,000 people and destroyed agriculture in the area.

You also have representatives from Bangladesh, a very low-lying country which is desperately afraid of what will happen if the sea levels rise too high and flood its highly-populated low-lying areas.

There are also representatives of AOSIS (the Association of Small Island States) some of which would be completely flooded and disappear if the expected sea level rise occurred.

You are very clear whose fault all this is, and it makes you very angry when countries like the USA say that they won¹t try to achieve their targets because developing countries aren¹t expected to do anything. The figures speak for themselves.

US 5.99 tonnes of carbon emitted per person
Australia 5.14 tonnes of carbon emitted per person
Canada 4.67 tonnes of carbon emitted per person
India 0.31 tonnes of carbon emitted per person
Bangladesh 0.05 tonnes of carbon emitted per person
Ethiopia 0.03 tonnes of carbon emitted per person

Why should you and your people have to suffer for what the richest countries have done? The planet does not belong only to the rich, it belongs to everyone!