As Mr. Marthinus Van Schalwyk (Minister of Environment, South Africa) said, we are three months after Bali, and twenty months before the UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 (It is thought that if a post-2012 agreement is to come into force on time, negotiations need to be completed in Copenhagen, so that national and international legal processes have the necessary time for any treaty to come into force). The scale of the challenge and the investment needed was frankly highlighted by Mr. Nobo Tanaka from the IEA, and as Tony Blair explained in his opening address, to be effective a low-carbon revolution would need to be on the size and scale of the industrial revolution to have the global impact necessary, but as Mr. Elliot Morely, GLOBE International, explained in his comments, this revolution needs to be completed in a third of the time.Although this was all said and agreed, after four ministerial meetings of this process it still felt that as if people were still moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic, the alarm bells were indeed ringing, but collectively, no-one has yet got down to the hard work within the engine room, and tried collectively to change the course of the ship.

For REEEP, the meeting itself had several highpoints. Funding was gained from the United Kingdom Government for the next three years of operations, which will allow REEEPThe Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) is a non-profit, specialist change agent aiming to catalyse the market for renewable energy and energy efficiency, with a primary focus on emerging markets and developing countries. to continue its work and seek further funding. On the margins of the meeting, many new and exciting high-level contacts were made, which we can hopefully use to further our work, and on a policy level throughout the meeting energy efficiency and renewable technologies were recognized as key to any solution. REEEP must work now to maximize these openings and maintain momentum that we continue to build to reduce the barriers to the successful deployment and integration of renewable and energy efficiencyUsing less energy/electricity to perform the same function. Programs designed to use electricity more efficiently - doing the same with less. technologies, as tomorrow’s sustainable future is REEEP’s challenge today.