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Could global warming lead to Copenhagen's famous mermaid statue disappearing beneath the waves?

COPENHAGEN: the little mermaid statue; Hamlet’s castle; bacon – the classic way we remember the understated Danish capital. However, from December 2009, the tourist board there may find itself fielding enquiries about where Obama met Merkel to broker a last-minute deal. To bring home the bacon so to speak. To ensure that the little mermaid won’t be drowned by rising sea levels.

This is where the UN Summit on climate change will be taking place there next month – in case you hadn’t already heard. It’s an important meeting. A very important meeting. And Wales is part of it.

While our country won’t have a seat at the highest negotiating table, it will hold a position that could help secure the critical legally-binding deal that the world is waiting for. This is because the National Assembly holds the chair of the Network of Regional Governments for Sustainable Development – or NRG 4 SD – with Jane Davidson taking the lead. Other members include Catalonia, Sao Paulo State and West Java. This network could prove itself snappier in direction and ambition than its title might suggest. It is a movement of regional governments that shares information and experience about sustainable development policy-making at the regional level of governance. This includes projects such as the direct provision of region-to-region help that links Wales to Mbale, Uganda.

The NRG 4 SD is a voice for regional governments across the globe. With some 38 members from all the United Nations regions of the globe (15 from Europe, 13 from South America, 7 from Africa and 3 from Asia) the NRG 4 SD is one of the few genuinely global groupings that will be at the talks.

This global voice is one reason for its importance. The other is that the NRG 4 SD speaks on behalf of those who will have to deliver the deal that the world leaders come agree. They are the ones that will have to walk the walk on whatever agreements are reached, on mitigation and adaptation in both developed and poorer countries. Whatever member states sign up to, it is regional and local governments who will have to make changes in such fields as transport, renewable energy and low carbon technology.

NRG 4 SD has developed detailed policy on climate change and is involved in preparatory talks at Barcelona today and tomorrow as well as at Copenhagen itself. Members also have the opportunity to influence their own member state or regional bloc representatives. They can feed this common position into key negotiating partners, which include the EU, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, Russia, Japan and Canada.

Individually, the members may be regarded as small fish. As a collective, the NRG 4 SD can exert real influence over what a deal should look like. As one of the few alliances with policies agreed by countries rich and poor, it can speak with moral authority to world leaders in Copenhagen about what can and should be done. The network operates hand-in-glove with Climate Group, a collection of private and public sector players including big hitters such as the State of California, Nike, Tesco and BP.

But the voices of the people of Wales, as part of a world wide movement demanding change, will also be heard loud and clear at Copenhagen. People up and down the country have been taking action – writing to MPs and newspapers, posting video messages on YouTube, signing petitions, taking part in flashmob demonstrations. And on December 5 hundreds of people from Wales will be going to “The Wave”, a mass demonstration through the streets of London. This typifies what Al Gore said in a Radio 4 interview earlier this week – that over a million grassroots organisations have sprung up in the last few years worldwide focused on climate change.

The breadth of movements in Wales involved in campaigning on climate change is vast – Urdd, Women’s Institute, NUS and Woodland Trust among them – and proof that the movement is growing getting stronger. We are seeing the largest global grassroots movement in history emerge. Our messages will stand along side those from across the world, united in a call for serious action by world leaders.

People the world over are beginning to see the manifestation of this crisis unfolding in their own lives. Wales is no exception. First hand witness accounts, from home and abroad, of what people are suffering is the focus of Oxfam Cymru’s Climate Hearings events.

Held all over the world from Australia to Peru, Malawi and the USA, Hearings give a voice to those most affected by climate change. From local villages in Ethiopia to large-scale moments with Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town, Climate Hearings provide a platform for the people who are most vulnerable to climate change. Accounts of honest first hand experiences will be turned into effective pressure, and Oxfam Cymru will kick off of its Climate Hearings in Aberystwyth next Wednesday evening – November 11, at the National Library.

Climate Hearings will also take place the following week in Cardiff (November 16) and Llangefni (November 19). Testimonies will come from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Colombia, Kenya, Nepal as well as Wales and England demonstrating the current impact of climate change.

Oxfam Cymru wants people in Wales to come along to the Climate Hearings to share experiences with international speakers and testify about the effects of climate change in their countries and communities. Stories will be recorded and passed on to make sure that world leaders and the UK Government take the messages to the negotiating table in Copenhagen.

George Monbiot will be speaking at the Aberystwyth event next Wednesday alongside Wyn Evans, a farmer from Pembrokeshire, and other witnesses from Ceredigion who will attest to the local impact of climate change in Wales. In his Guardian column on last Monday, Monbiot wrote with astonishment that scepticism about global warming is growing. Indeed, this growing scepticism beggars belief, with the increasing scientific evidence from a range of sources and consensus among scientists that the climate is changing faster than ever and unless we act now it will be too late.

Reading about levels of increasing CO2 emissions, how Bangladesh has suffered yet another cyclone and of droughts for the third year running in Northern Kenya, it might not get your mind around the crisis that we are facing. Believing facts and figures may be hard, but hearing human testimony and sharing true, first hand witness accounts from Monbiot and others at an Oxfam Cymru Climate Hearing might help get the message to hit home.

The Visit Copenhagen website – Wonderful Copenhagen on a Google search – notes that the first written record of the city was almost 1,000 years ago and that “The occupation of the population consisted mainly of fishing the plentiful herring in Øresund, the narrow stretch of water separating Denmark and Sweden”.

Will the UN Summit hail a deal that we can indeed call ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’ or rather as something rotten from the state of Denmark? A red herring, or the answer that the world is calling for?