COP15 | Copenhagen, Denmark. Mat McDermott/Flickr. Some rights reserved.In 2009, as I stood in the Copenhagen winter outside the failure that was COP15, I swore we should never make the same mistake.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had failed to respect the fundamental principle of sovereignty. COP15 was an autocratic, anti-democratic model where wealthy nations hypocritically wagged their fingers at developing countries and told them to reduce their emissions to solve a problem they hadn’t caused, but were feeling the sharpest edge of.
That top-down model had not been what we in GLOBE (the Global Legislators’ Organisation for a Balanced Environment) had wanted, and we knew it had to change. We knew we needed a bottom-up approach. One month before Copenhagen, GLOBE had developed what was, then, a radical idea: countries should propose their own emission reductions via their own people through their own parliament, where they could be held accountable by the democratic process.
