ACT Alliance

Photo: ACT Alliance/Thomas Ekelund

Rosalia Soley has a lot on her plate. As someone who specialises in risk management – the science, or perhaps art, of predicting where natural disasters will strike and how best to prepare for them - in crisis-beset Central America, she has people to meet, policies to write and a government to advise. As well as working full time for ACT member the Lutheran World Federation, Soley is a climate change advisor to the El Salvadorian government as part of its delegation in Durban over the next fortnight.

Talking climate change with Soley means embarking on a fascinating journey through politics, economics and climate science. To her, everything is interlinked. She is a big picture thinker: someone who sees all the details but never lets trees get in the way of the wood.

“Climate change is all about power, all about money. The fact of climate change itself is not the problem. It’s the fact that it’s a hazard that hits the vulnerable and poor the hardest. That’s the problem.”

She regards climate change as a daily reality for people living in Central America, one whose effects are often serious. She considers the recent torrential rain caused by a low-pressure system - the so-called E12 depression - just one of many examples of extreme weather change. The E12 swamped the Central America peninsula with twice as much rain in ten days as did Hurricane Mitch, the most powerful and destructive force of the 1998 Atlantic hurricane season. And, like the UN resident coordinator in El Salvador, Roberto Valent, Rosalia has no doubt that climate change is responsible.

“The indigenous people of El Salvador say their knowledge is worthless. They no longer know when it’s going to rain. When I was a child we could smell the rain. We would feel the winds in November and say ‘Oh it’s time for our winter break.’ ” That is no longer the case.”

Who pays the debt?

More than anything else, Soley sees the climate change debate as a question of justice. There is a historic debt, she contends, from the richest countries to the poorest. Two and a half centuries of industrialisation in the wealthy and prosperous global north – with their heat-producing greenhouse gas emissions – have racked up a huge climatic cost, and the bill has been sent to poor and vulnerable countries in the south.

“The planet’s natural climatic cycles and fluctuations have been accelerated by heavy industrialisation”, she says. “In Central America we don’t have the institutional structures to deal with the consequences of our actions. We don’t have the policies or social programmes to enable people to adapt quickly enough to the effects of climate change on their day-to-day lives”.

The problem is not just local: it extends to Africa and Asia too. But rather than accepting defeat as a foregone conclusion, Soley believes the south is uniquely placed to transform even the climate change disasters that are appearing with increasing frequency. It’s all about being prepared, and an emphasis on advance planning for disasters will be one of the key messages she will be voicing this week in Durban. Not least when she addresses her own government.

“We have to transform our reality, and that means creating real policies that take all sectors into account. The health sector, the education sector, town planning, civil protection and the finance ministry all have to be involved. Everything that concerns people’s wellbeing."

A new type of progress

But it also comes down to finding different ways of developing than the carbon-intensive model of industrialisation that has become synonymous with progress in much of the world. Soley has no problem imagining a worst-case scenario for Central America if we don’t. She conjures a terrifying vision of contaminated waters, mass hunger and countries literally disappearing into the sea as a near future not a distant dystopia. Again she views the problem in its totality.

“Yes, governments have to find the money for poor and vulnerable countries to adapt to climate change, and to mitigate its worst effects, but it’s time to see the bigger picture. We need an approach to development that is about more than throwing up big buildings, shopping malls and highways. We need one that’s about investing in social programmes, healthcare and leisure time.”

Her ambition for the COP17 is clear. The Kyoto Protocol – the legally binding commitment of a number of countries to reduce emissions that expires this year - has to be agreed on for a second period. No Kyoto Protocol, no sustainable future, as far as Soley is concerned.

“We are losing nature as we speak, our quality of life. In Central America, we are losing the quantity of our plants and animals, and we are about to lose quality. I have a child, and if no sustainable solution is found, I will move for my child’s sake.”

But Soley believes in the future. Being part of ACT strengthens that belief.

“ACT Alliance is a strategic platform that really can make a difference. As a network of churches from around the world, it contains a lot of people wanting the same thing: change. And that is what we have to promote.“

Confident that the COP17 talks will take the world in the right direction, she quotes the former archbishop Angel Furlan from Argentina, who recently said to her

“If we believe we have hope. If we have hope we are resilient. If we are resilient we can live in utopia.”

Rosalia Soley represents ACT’s Central America region at the COP17 climate change conference in Durban. She is also acting as a climate change advisor to the government of El Salvador.