Aid Groups Push for Clean Energy

The World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam are getting into the lobbying arena as climate change looms larger in the communities they serve. WWFThe World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam are getting into the lobbying arena as climate change looms larger in the communities they serve.

BARCELONA—When Samantha Smith started working for the World Wildlife Fund more than a decade ago, she was stationed in the Arctic, where her work focused on the species she was trying to protect in that habitat.

‘‘I had my encounters with polar bears,’’ she said.

Now, she is working on a much broader set of problems. ‘‘We started out looking at animals, species and the places where they lived, but we are finding that a lot of this is about natural resources,’’ she said.

WWF, the venerable conservation organization, is increasingly putting resources into research and advocacy in an effort to change public policy on climate change and clean energy. It is not alone among nonprofit groups. A variety of organizations — from those that bring development aid to those that focus on animal protection — have taken up the cause of global climate change. Often through broad coalitions likr the Climate Action Network they lobby governments, pushing for policy changes that would favor clean energy.

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While most of the people at the WWF still work on protecting animals and their habitats—from polar bears to river dolphins in the Mekong Delta to elephants in Cameroon — advocates like Ms. Smith and her team try to persuade policy makers and corporations that sustainable energy should be pursued.

‘‘We are still out in the field with our boots on, but also at places like this and the World Economic Forum,’’ she said last week at the Global Clean Energy forum in Barcelona, where she faced Charles Soothill of the energy giant Alstom in a debate about European emissions and renewable energy goals.

‘‘They can see here that NGOs are ready to take them on on their terms,’’ she said.

Oxfam, the charity that fights poverty in the developing world, is also working to put climate-change issues before policy makers.

Trisha O’Rourke, a spokeswoman for Oxfam, said: ‘‘Over the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve increased our work both in helping communities prepare but then also lobbying and campaigning for a global deal on climate change.’’

Oxfam works with communities directly affected by climate change and also invests in lobbying governments and coalition building.

‘‘If there isn’t change made at a global level in terms of policy, and if we keep on polluting, we are on a path of destruction for a lot of the communities we work with,’’ said Ms. O’Rourke.

Christian Aid, a British and Irish church organization that was founded after World War II to help European refugees, is now working on alleviating global poverty while lobbying governments on climate change issues.

‘‘We realized that climate change was having a radical effect on the lives of poor people,’’ said Rachel Baird, a spokeswoman.

According to Ms. Baird, the organization worked to ensure that British companies would have to publicly disclose carbon dioxide emissions, as part of the Climate Change Act of 2008 in Britain.

Ms. Smith, who leads the WWF Climate and Energy Initiative, cites recent changes to sustainability laws in Mexico, South Africa and Australia as examples of successes her team has had building coalitions and advocating for changes in legislation.

‘‘One of the places where we have our power is to get people to vote, demonstrate, purchase, react in large numbers,’’ she said.

She said her experiences working on the first Arctic Climate Impact Assessment prompted her own realization that species could only be saved by looking at more global issues.

‘‘I suddenly realized that climate change is not happening in many decades — it is affecting the Arctic now,’’ she said.

The WWF is beginning an energy finance campaign next spring that will target large investors, investment companies and large funds, like retirement funds, that are beholden to their members. The ultimate goal is to get these investors to put their money in sustainable technologies.

‘‘We are not going to archive the original goal of protecting species,” Ms. Smith said, “unless we understand the things that are forcing the laws of the places and the species.”