Thursday 10 December 2009

PacificVoices@COP15: Fiji and Vanuatu youth

Geoffrey Smith, FijiTV, Climate Pasifika media

Thursday 1oth December 2009 -- On Day 4 of COP15 we caught up with more voices from the Pacific who shared with us their thoughts on which directions they would like to see the summit take. Future Pacific leaders Emma Airu Christopher from Fiji and Paul Nalau from Vanuatu shared their vision.

TRANSCRIPT: Hi I'm Emma and I'm with Project Survival Pacific under AYCC. So far the experience has been really good,. We've been getting very good media attention and our stories as Pacific Islanders about what we are facing at home and how the emission rates of those big states are affecting us back home with sea level rise, storm surges and ocean acidification.
But it's really good that we are given this opportunity to tell our stories to the world.
We'd really like to get the big countries to empathize with us on our situation that it's either their lifestyles or our livelihoods. We just hoping that negotiations go well and to seal the deal.

My name is Paul Nalau and Im from Vanuatu. I'm here as part of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition which is part of the survival project. So I'm here just to support the cause of our governments and AOSIS and just representing the voices of young people in the Pacific and the face of climate change. What we want is recognition of the vulnerability we are placed in and we just want to be recognised and to have a global commitment in supporting us to find some ways and means to survive basically.The Pacific as we know per person has more cultures than any part of the world even though we have only zero point five percent of the worlds population we make up more than 30 percent of the earths surface.So we are here to remind the world that we have lots of things that the world needs to keep.We are the people who brought to the world tattoos, we have big marine life and we also got rugby and lots of cultures. We have like over a thousand languages in the Pacific and they represent diverse cultures.

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