Call Issued To Occupy Durban

A leading international statesman has called for vulnerable nations to use the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement at the international climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa. José María Figueres — the former president of Costa Rica, former manager of the Davos World Economic Forum, and brother of Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — told reporters there should be an “Occupy Durban” action by the nations most affected by climate change at the Conference of the Parties (COP):

The riots of London, and the indignados of Madrid, and the now growing global Occupy Wall Street movement is a sign of the frustration felt by many given that we are not addressing their economic needs. So with respect to climate maybe we need an Occupy Durban. A sit-in by the delegations of those countries that are most affected, that are going from one COP to the next COP to the next COP without getting positive and concrete responses on the issues that they want dealt with, which are transfer of technology, which are new financing mechanisms to be able to finance adaptation and combat climate change, which are everything it takes to move development in a new direction.

Watch an excerpt of his interview with OneWorld TV at the Climate Vulnerable Forum in Bangladesh:

“We can leapfrog from where we are today to a new, global low-carbon economy that will provide the jobs, the opportunities for entrepreneurship, and for capital deployment that we need to get out of the economic crisis which we are now in,” said Figueres, sounding a note of hope.

“We are already witnessing important amounts of suffering caused by climate change,” Figueres concluded. “That should be enough to get us acting.”