COP15 Brief – Day One: Government, Academia, and Business Form “Triple Helix” for Climate Solutions

By CSRwire Contributing Writers Bill Baue and Cimbria Badenhausen of Sea Change Media

Drama surrounds today’s commencement of the UN Climate Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen. The region is buzzing from Friday’s news of US President Barack Obama’s shift to attend the final days of negotiations, when a global climate deal is most likely to be brokered. The “ClimateGate” debate still hums across the Web over whether the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in mid-November put the “nail in the coffin” of climate science, or simply show how little dirt the denial camp could dig up to discredit climate science. And companies like GE and Siemans are clamoring to attend the oversubscribed Copenhagen Business Day, organized by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and International Chamber of Commerce, to weigh in on the climate talks.

These three – government, academia, and business – form a “triple helix” of actors who play key roles in helping solve the climate crisis, according to Karl-Erik Grevendahl, Advisor for Sustainable Business Development at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Southern Sweden. “If governments work by themselves, they can achieve a lot of things -- the same goes for universities and companies. But when they work together, they can achieve much higher goals than they do alone,” Grevendahl told Sea Change Radio Climate Correspondent Cimbria Badenhausen in Malmo, Sweden, the “twin” city of Copenhagen that is bracing for four thousand visitors spilling across the Oresund Bridge. Grevendahl, who helped organize a climate conference in Lund focused on this triple helix the weekend before the Copenhagen Conference, urges COP15 participants to leverage these interconnections toward more significant outcomes from the climate talks.