At
the conference, South African academics Hennie
Stoffberg and Paul Prinsloo launched their new book
“Climate
Change: A Guide for Corporates”. Caroline
d'Essen has interviewed the authors about issues of climate change
justice and the fairness of carbon market system.
1
– In your opinion, what were the main reasons that made the Kyoto’s
Protocol fail? How can we avoid that a new agreement in COP15 takes
the same way of Kyoto Protocol?
Every
civilization needs to rely on some system of beliefs and to have its
own characteristic framework of references that people’ minds can
rely on. For some civilizations it will be a religion, for others philosophical
systems.
What is this framework when
it comes to the Western world?
"For the Western world, since
Rene Descartes, it has become science", explains Professor Fred Dallmayr.
‘What a relief!’ one might
think. ‘Science makes for reliable bases to build the society on.
After three days of plenary
talks, track sessions with many different presentations on conceptual
and foundational research, education, journalism and business, Jesper Garsdal, Fred Dallmayr and
Hans Köchler restated the main value
of the Global Dialogue Conference ’09 as a means to
facilitate comprehensive
reflections.
With regards to the issue of climate change, Professor Dallmayr of Notre Dame University remarked that ‘we have to talk about climate change from many different
May Belle Guillergan's video from the final day of the conference contains lots of views on the conference. See the interviews and hear the comments from conference participants.
On the third day of the conference, May Guillergan and her video camera covered the journalism plenary with Chris Nash, asked questions about the value of the conference at a press conference, and went to hear presentations on the journalism track.
Climate change is a scientific fact and I never would have thought that
it could bring much debate on the floor. If it’s a fact, then there
should simply be an acceptance of it; simply do what you can do in your
own corner. Yet I guess what really drives debates over it, is that we
actually could still do something about it but we often just disregard
it.
Back home, in the Philippines, there are more urgent problems to be
discussed, which is why environmental issues may often be set aside
May Belle Guillergan from the blogging team continued her filming of the conference's second day attending Fred Dallmayr's plenary talk and visiting the journalism and the business tracks.
In this intriguing video from the opening day of the conference, May Belle Guillergan from the Philippines takes an intercultural view of the conference set against a backdrop of research that shows that Danes are the happiest people in the world.
The lighting was perhaps not the best, and the sound could have been better - but this short - and poetic - video by Caroline d'Essen from the blogging team perfectly captures the atmosphere of the opening day of the conference.
Thursday morning, Chris Nash talked about
a revolution which has to take
place in the field of journalism in order to cover the issue of climate
change more properly.
However, in the afternoon sessions of the journalism track,
a lot of the obstacles in the revolutionary road became visible when
Chinese, British and American journalists from the Erasmus Mundus programme
(with help from Norway) presented.