There’s a photo of me on my office door: I’m standing in Muir Woods north of San Francisco hugging an enormous redwood tree.  At the bottom, I’ve written, “Have you hugged a tree lately?”  That’s a bit of a tongue in cheek question.  You see, when I started working on climate change over a year ago, I wondered, why am I working on an environmental issue? Climate change is about the environment.  It’s about trees and air and water.  Then I started digging deeper and connecting the dots.  And that’s when I realized that climate change isn’t just about the environment.  It’s about people: you, me, our families, our children.  It’s about the one billion plus people around the world who eke out an existence on less than a dollar a day. 

Climate change for them isn’t about a slightly warmer summer or a rainy month of October.  For people living in extreme poverty, climate change is about having enough food to eat in the face of increasing droughts.  It’s about having fewer instances of diarrhea in the face of more frequent flooding. It’s about not losing your home and livelihood repeatedly in the face of more severe cyclones.  Put frankly, it’s about survival.  This is the human face of  climate change because climate change is a people issue.  And we can’t afford to ignore it – for our own wellbeing and for the sake of poverty alleviation.  We can’t succeed if we ignore climate change. 

So in the final fifty days before global negotiations conclude in Copenhagen, the real question to ask isn’t “have you hugged a tree lately?” but “have you hugged a person lately?”