When I played my role in the policy exercise, I felt fairly helpless. My role was developing countries, and we had no resources or money to contribute to reducing climate change. However, after negotiating our outlook got better, as we realized that there were various steps we could take to do our part since the other countries were willing to help us out with funding. Our group originally felt that we would be able to make the most impact if we drastically reduced our deforestation and increased afforestation. These ideas changed once we realized that even if we put 100% of our efforts into the forests, it didn’t contribute that much to decreasing the overall change in global climate. I think that it will be very difficult to cut emissions, but that it is something that can be done. Each country would have to focus a lot of their time and money to do this, though there are many people and countries who don’t believe that we should. The major costs and barriers to implementation come from protecting the forests, planting new forests, and especially from attempting to decrease the amount of CO2 released by each household in well developed countries such as the US. Change in the US can be catalyzed by passing legislation that significantly increases the restraints on corporate green house emissions.
