In order to get us to meet important people during the conference we came up with the idea of the "Pink Badge Challenge". This consists in introducing ourselves to a Party member of any delegation. At the COP, "Party" is another word for "Country", and official country delegates can be identified by the pink border on their name tag. For Cale and I, it was Lela; she was a representative from the Turkish delegation. From her we learned how Parties distribute their assets in the sector where they have an area of expertise. The completion the pink badge challenge gave us the opportunity to receive a drawing from Lela, one of the Mexican negotiators. Even though this drawing came from a moment of boredom, it captured one of the few delegates that took the time to participate in the side events, as well as the official negotiations. The delegate portrayed Mexico's intention to reduce CO2 emissions by unifying the public transport: tramways, trains, bicycles, planes, and cars, into a unified grid. This means that pedestrians have access to public bicycles; those bicycles have access to public buses, trains or tramways; and those modes of transportation lead to other transportation systems like airports or shipping ports. This integration will allow civilization to communally transport themselves efficiently.
A contributor to the issue pointed out that, "Our journey starts by walking". If we form our priorities to this process of thinking we should be able to reduce our CO2 emissions by significant quantities. Unifying all contributors to the public transportation sector will allow society to function more smoothly and more cleanly, and this will not only contribute to the mitigation of the climate issue, but it will also affect the people's lifestyle and health quality. Belgium had the initiative to create a car sharing system,"Cambio", in order to significantly reduce the private transport CO2 emission rate; "ONE car will substitute the use of NINE cars in today's transportation grid system". Intercommunicating transportation systems will allow citizens to ride their bikes to work and transport their bikes on their buses through the bus systems as well as the train/metro network. Furthermore, some of the energy used to power the public transport sector can be imputed back into the grid and "recycled" to lessen the demand for the production energy through fossil fuels.
In another note, Thursday 29th became a very eventful day as I met, talked, and experienced first hand how the Colombian delegation (my own country) negotiated their interests in the main hall. Afterwards, I talked to Isabel Cavelier Adarve, a negotiator herself, and we agreed to a follow up meeting with the NGO and the South American delegates, today at 1pm (+3 GMT). Isabel is the Adviser of Environmental Affairs in the Economic, Social and Environmental Affairs Office. We will see how the meetings go today and we will keep you posted Minnesota!
I'm happy to hear about Mexico's interesting transportation plan, and the sketch is great! Sounds like the conversations with Lela and Isabel were quite informative and fun!
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