When I played my role in the policy exercise I felt upset because other countries were very hesitant to donate money to us (other developing countries). We need the most money because of how high our carbon emission rates are and how little money we have to fix it. It was frustrating to see that other countries didn’t want to help us, considering that lowering our carbon emission rates would significantly help lowering world wide carbon emission rates.
At first I was frustrated, but after we expressed our point of view, other countries became more willing to give us the money we need. I realized that a lot of the reason why other countries didn’t want to donate to us was because we were asking for such a high amount of money ($200 billion), but once we explained that the steep amount was necessary, we started to get a lot more money from other countries.
Our group didn’t change our idea of how much money we wanted, but we did change our ideas on how we were going to use the money after negotiating with the other countries. At first, we had planned to use most of it to maintain the rainforest and plant more trees, but we then decided to allocate more money toward green energy.
The changes in where we decided to allocate our money was brought upon by talking to other countries, such as the US. We realized that, in order to get the money we want, we would need to use some of it on things that they wanted us to use it on, which included green energy.
I do believe that emissions can be cut, but the world needs to work together to make it happen. Focusing on your own country won’t solve the problem, because climate change will spread and affect the whole world if we don’t do more to fix it.
Green energy is much more expensive to invest our money into than afforestation, which means that the economy will go down. Each individual country would need to decide if it’s worth it to put money into green energy, which could lead to conflict if they don’t choose to do what other countries want them to do.
We can catalyze change in the US by focusing on decreasing carbon emission from large corporations and producers. We can also focus on lowering individual emission rates by educating people on the importance of reducing our carbon footprint. While people know that climate change exists, most people don’t understand the severity and how quickly it will soon affect the whole world.