Brad Sparks, Director, Global Green Initiative, KPMG:
Dan, I understand you are the official youth representative for the Netherlands. I was wondering if you can share a little bit what that role is at the COP 15.
Don Gerritson, Youth Representative in the Netherlands’ Government Delegation:
Well, what I basically do is trying to convey the input that I got from the Dutch youth into the official government delegation from the Netherlands. Yeah, we gathered all the stances of the Dutch youth regarding climate change for the last two years. We put that down into a position paper, which we try to push forward within the delegation. So, yeah, we have had the opportunity to hand over our position paper to the Minister of the Environment, the Minister of Development Cooperation and we will hand it over to our Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende from the Netherlands, so yea we would like to push forward our stances from within.
Brad Sparks:
And I know you have been very active in this for a while and you have also worked for KPMG for a while as a sustainability consultant. How does your experience here translate into your profession and your job at KPMG.
Don Gerritson:
Yeah. I think, both roles invigorate each other. I think from the one hand it is really excellent to see how these processes, these works, enter these UN processes and trying to negotiate on an international binding treaty, which is really interesting and really good to meet all these people.
On the other hand it is also very good to approach these issues from a more business perspective and to have practical experience on how to implement these broad issues into practice. So just one example, as we are probably all know, some cities are responsible for some 75% of all GHG emissions and we can talk about it here. We can try to make concrete, lets say, yeah, concrete decisions on how to reduce emissions into the cities but for example for KPMG I could really implement these decisions and really advice cities on how to become more sustainable, how to become carbon neutral, so it is more putting into practice about what we are talking about here.