UN-Ambassador of Surinam is Visiting
Climate change menaces his country
Henry L. Mac-Donald, UN-Ambassador of Surinam, a country strongly menaced by climate chage, visiting Science Park Gelsenkirchen.
For Henry L. Mac-Donald, Ambassador with United Nations, "Gelsenkirchen" is a city that he feels connected to in two ways. In the first place his brother Orlando Engelaar played with Gelsenkirchen soccer club "FC Schalke 04" in 2008. Secondly he is very interested in "Solar City Gelsenkirchen", because his home country Surinam belongs to the Alliance of Small Island States which aims at improving climate protection.
"If the world climate was heating by two degrees Celsius, as it is being negotiated in Copenhagen, 90 percent of the area where most of our population lives and where most of our industry is located, would be flooded. This is why we are fighting for a global warming of a maximum of 1.5 degrees." says the UN-Ambassador.
Experts say that Surinam ranks lowest on the list of countries, expected to suffer most from climate change and global warming. Together with Dr. Heinz-Peter Schmitz-Borchert and Wolfgang Jung, corporate management of "Solar City Gelsenkirchen e.V.", read up on the prospects of solar energy in industrial countries.
Besides a little of crude oil and ethanol made of sugarcane, Surinam covers some 80 percent of its power requirements with waterpower, free of CO2 emissions. But in this process climate change causes some problems, too, because there has been clearly less rain in the last few years. Mac-Donald is determinded to negotiate as hard as he can on the climate summit in Copenhagen, together with the President of Surinam.