Compassion lands in Copenhagen

I’m Lesley Lambert, Compassion’s Director of Research. With my colleagues Barbara Romanowicz, Joyce D’Silva and Lasse Bruun, we’ll be blogging from the Copenhagen climate summit for the next two weeks.

Compassion’s at the climate change summit with the goal of putting humane and sustainable farming – and therefore farm animal welfare – into the heart of the climate change debate. Humane farming must be a key part of any real, long term solution to the global challenges we face – solving global warming and feeding the world as populations grow. So far, farming has been a small issue in the climate change discussions – but we’re here to begin to transform that situation.

Compassion is a formal ‘observer’ organisation, recognised by the United Nations who is hosting the event - but being an observer doesn't mean we are silent - quite the opposite. We have access to all the open COP climate change discussions and throughout the next two weeks we’ll be lobbying for humane farming in these sessions and other events within the COP meeting. We’ll exhibit at Agriculture Day, a major humane and sustainable farming conference, and we’ll aim to build support for our work by presenting a new film and our ‘Eating the Planet’ report at the Klimaforum (the ‘people’s climate change summit’), with a potentially huge audience of activists and media.

As we arrived in Copenhagen this afternoon there was an air of anticipation throughout the city. In between the throng of downtown Christmas shoppers, hundreds of activists and organisations are getting ready. Lasse and I were busy checking out the huge COP venue and getting ready to hit our stride as the conference opens tomorrow.

The team will update you every couple of days, to let you know the latest.