![]() ![]() We must find new ways to bring carbon home, to where nature intended it to be. With the Brexit vote raising question marks over Britain’s future global role, could we see a welcome reawakening of interest in the Commonwealth among thoughtful citizens, politicians and business leaders? But I didn’t know that it had been banging the drum on climate change since the late 1980s - nor that the organization now has something of a firebrand as its secretary-general. I knew that the Commonwealth promotes democracy, the rule of law, human rights, good governance and social and economic development. A fair few members are island states, acutely nervous about the growing risks of climate change, particularly storms (such as tropical storm Erika, which devastated Dominica last year) and rising sea levels. As background: It comprises 52 nations and is home to 2.2 billion people - 60 percent of them younger than 30. Several Americans at the event, convened under a ceiling pulsing with bloodthirsty images of the Battle of Blenheim, hadn’t known there was a British Commonwealth. True or not - and she has a well developed sense of humor - Baroness Scotland said they put pins on all the COP21 seats, insisting delegates couldn’t sit down until they had voted in the right way. The Commonwealth’s star seemed to fade in recent years, so I failed to notice the extraordinary impact of the organization’s behind-the-scenes lobbying captured in 2015’s Commonwealth Leaders’ Statement on Climate Change, targeted at the COP21 summit in Paris. With global environmental change, we have backed ourselves into the mother of all corners. Early on in the event hosted by the Commonwealth Secretariat at Marlborough House, the former royal palace in whose car park we shortly would be filming, I impolitely told Baroness Scotland that my expectations had been low. Instead, to my surprise, it was an institution launched back in 1949 (the year I was born). The message, championed by participants such as Project Drawdown, was that the sooner we pull back the carbon we have dumped into the planet’s atmosphere and reinject it into the soils and forests where it belongs, the better off we will all be.īut, laying my heart bare, carbon wasn’t the object of my renewed passion. Our video’s title was "Bringing Carbon Home." At a time when carbon is increasingly demonized, we were capturing our passion for the element on which all known life is based. The video was a breakout task at a conference on regenerative development to reverse climate change. ![]() But it happened while I was filming a short video with several self-confessed carbonphiliacs - including biomimicry guru Janine Benyus and Baroness Patricia Scotland, secretary-general of Britain’s Commonwealth Secretariat. It’s not every day I fall back in love in a car park.
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