President Nasheed of the Maldives speaks at Klimaforum, Copenhagen, 14 Dec 2009

Hi All

President Nasheed of the Maldives’ speech at the Klimaforum tonight. The Klimaforum is the ‘alternative’ Copenhagen climate summit venue. He’s the first head of state to arrive in Copenhagen for the climate negotiations and also has a really progressive, science-based position on climate — so he’s getting a lot of attention. 350.org, the amazing campaign I’m doing some media liason work for at Copenhagen, laid on the stage and called out their supporters to give him some love. None of us walked away disappointed.

Nasheed spoke to a packed audience of (I estimate) more than a thousand people and was mobbed by dozens of journalists as he left the stage. A very calm, upright person, he made a great impression (he was a journalist and a democracy rights activist/political prisoner before becoming President).

Here are a couple of my images of Nasheed. They’re not great art, but what the heck — it’s fun to see what this diminutive great man looks like. They’re copyrighted by me, so don’t use them w/out my permission. I wanted to post my audio recording of his speech here but WordPress has gone all buggy and won’t upload audio files tonight er, this morning, actually. It’s 01:32 and I need sleep!

Cheers

Adam