Rome-to-Paris climate marcher says COP21 failed poor nations

Globally influential climate activist Yeb Saño has just returned home to the Philippines disappointed, having recently trekked 1,500km from Rome to Paris only to see the COP21 climate change summit reach a spectacularly bad result last weekend, he says.

Saño and those in his multi-faith and environmental entourage —called the “People’s Pilgrimage" — had marched for two months across Europe, praying for a miracle.

They wanted greater protection for climate-ravaged poorer nations like his Pacific archipelago home. His long walk for climate action inspired marches and fasts around the planet, from Brooklyn to Toronto. But in his expert view, as his country's former chief climate negotiator, the Paris climate agreement failed to protect poor countries.

“We should guard our sense of jubilation,” he writes, post-Paris."The nations that agreed to this outcome cannot take sanctuary under a diplomatic resolution that risks trivializing the suffering of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable."

The National Observer caught up with Saño near the end of COP21. The 41-year-old first rocketed to worldwide attention at an earlier COP climate summit in Warsaw in 2013.

Typhoon Haiyan—the strongest recorded tropical cyclone ever to make landfall —had just slammed into his nation. Ten thousand were killed instantly with an almost biblical storm, leaving many children orphaned. On behalf of his country, he tearfully told the U.N. plenary two years ago:

“I struggle to find words for the images that we see on the news coverage."

Typhoon Haiyan's destruction in Tacloban, a city in central Philippines on Nov. 2013. Photo by Daria Devyatkina.

“I struggle to find the words to describe how I feel about the losses. Up to this hour, I agonize, waiting for word of the fate of my very own relatives.”

"I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing in the storm."

Saño soon became known globally as the man who cried in Warsaw.