Background Briefing Conference Call:
Wednesday, November 23, from 11:00-11:45 AM EST
Call (712) 432-0900 and enter pass code 808707#

Washington DC — A background briefing conference call on the upcoming UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, will be led Wednesday by Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies. On the call Redman will share her commentary and analysis of recent UN intersessional meetings on the climate convention and design of the new Green Climate Fund, as well as what she anticipates seeing at the upcoming summit.

“Solving the climate crisis is the most urgent challenge of our time,” said Redman. “Our economy, our jobs, our health and our security depend on climate stability. But over the past year the United States has been undermining the continuation of the world’s only global treaty to curb greenhouse gas pollution, and has blocked critical progress on a Green Climate Fund and long-term financial support for poor countries most impacts by global warming. The Obama administration must use the Durban talks to clean up its act. Our future depends upon it.”

Redman will be traveling to South Africa for the summit, where she will be advocating for a fair and effective Green Climate Fund and a financial transaction tax as one source of revenue for climate finance, and helping to organize actions to turn up the heat on the leaders participating in the summit. The UN climate summit in Durban will be the fifth major climate summit at which Redman has worked to promote climate justice.

Redman has written extensively about the connection between the environment and the economy, has been actively engaged in advocacy and activism at the UN climate summits since 2007, and is a founding member of the global network Climate Justice Now! With recent scientific reports that global warming is worse than we thought, and that our window of opportunity to act closes in five years, Redman is particularly concerned with moves by the United States to push a weak “pledge and review” system of voluntary emissions cuts and their insistence on risky private sector financial products to pay for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.

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Institute for Policy Studies (www.ips-dc.org) is a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. We work with social movements to promote true democracy and challenge concentrated wealth, corporate influence, and military power.