INTERVIEW: We want to encourage civil society participation

Interview with Lynda A. Varlack, conservation and fisheries, government of the British Virgin Islands

In what way has the conference been useful?
It gives us a sense of what is going on globally as far as assessments of climate change, as well as successes and challenges that people have shared and why that's happening.

We have reevaluated where we are. Is what we're doing really the best way forward or should we change tack based on what we've heard here? It's also useful since we're trying to generate some knowledge back home about the fact that something like this does exist and can take place.

We want to encourage civil society participation, which was one of the workshops held last night. There is no way we can go forward if we are a bunch of technocrats, scientists and diplomats sitting around a table making decisions. What about the average person? It really means nothing to him if he's just trying to scrape together 2 cents to feed his family.

We need then to take the lessons learned here, take what needs to be done not just from the science but from what needs to be done to change economies and the way we actually educate ourselves and make everyday choices.

Everyday decisions being made for the past few centuries has resulted in the situation that we are in now.

Have you been able to make a contribution during the conference?
I actually made a presentation on the 'Relationships' workshop. Sometimes because of the constraints of the workshops and conference, we have cheated ourselves of enough time to really massage the whole thing and come up with something. We are kind of under the gun, so we're trying to capture a general picture. But when you do the follow up there are going to be some details missing that will require more meetings than we have time to do.

What mechanisms might be in place for any of the countries represented to really benefit from the experiences of the participants here? How well are they able to translate that to the people they work with, whether its peers or will it become just another document on the shelf?

Do you think there will be concrete proposals from the conference?
Yes, there will, but whether and how well they will be exploited to the best of their potential as outputs, that remains to be seen, and chances are probably not.