Green protesters plan to sandbag climate meeting
© 2000 Reuters Limited
September 12, 2000
BRUSSELS - Ecology activists plan to build a wall of sandbags around a conference of the world's environment ministers in November to call for action to halt global warming, Friends of the Earth said yesterday.
The environmental campaign group plans to bus in supporters from around Europe to protest outside the conference in The Hague in November where governments will decide how to make good their commitments to reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions.
The action group believes thousands of people will help stack up a one-kilometre wall of sandbags around the conference centre on November 18 as a symbolic reference to rising sea levels that could result from global weather pattern changes.
Campaigners fear that ministers will weaken the pledges governments made in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 to limit carbon dioxide emissions and other gases that are thought to alter the climate, by inserting "loopholes."
"In the run-up to The Hague November meeting, the stance taken by many European Union member states could end up in a recklessly weakened Kyoto Protocol, riddled with loopholes and get-out clauses," the group said in a statement.
"The world's governments must seize the last chance offered to save the Kyoto agreement...otherwise millions of us around the world will pay a terrible price for their failure," Friends of the Earth campaigner Roger Higman said in the statement.