Bianca Jagger fights for rain forests at UN climate change talks

Published on Sunday 7 December 2008 21:03

AMONG Bianca Jagger's happiest memories are long forest walks in her native Nicaragua with her mother.

Yesterday, she said that love of nature had inspired a struggle to stop what she believed was a looming environmental disaster that would deny her granddaughters the same pleasure. Ms Jagger was attending a two-week UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, lobbying to save the world's rain forests and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for the weather that is already devastating lives.

Ms Jagger, 58, chairwoman of an environmental group called World Future Council, said she hoped the talks among 190 nations seeking a new climate change treaty "will not be an exercise in futility".

The former model and ex-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger is using her celebrity to raise awareness of what she says is the need to stop climate change.

Jagger spoke with passion about forest preservation, which has emerged as an important issue at the climate talks. The cutting and burning of forests is responsible for 20 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions caused by man, according to the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change. Negotiators are seeking to make protection of forests part of a new treaty that would replace the Kyoto Protocol – an earlier climate change agreement that will expire in 2012.

"Scientists have sounded the alarm bells and told us we have only ten or 12 years before the point of no return," Jagger said.

"We as a generation have failed our children and our grandchildren."