No sector of the economy is immune from climate change, Keya Chatterjee, deputy director of climate change at the World Wildlife Fund said during "Climate Change Roadshow," a discussion in the School of International Service lounge Wednesday.
"If we don't react, the next generation will have to pay for it," she said.
The event was part of a speaker series the World Wildlife Fund and Hewlett-Packard holds at universities across the nation.
Declining population of some species, rising water levels and increasing instances of extreme weather events are consequences of not reacting to the climate change, Chatterjee said.
The main problem is that there are solutions to the problems but no political will to implement them. Both presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., do not address these problems because voters are not demanding it, she said.
Magda Turozynska, a senior in SIS, said she thinks climate change is an increasing problem for society.
"Global climate change is definitely a growing problem," she said. "At this event, I want to see the connection between what I have learned in class about it and what organizations and businesses actually do about it."
David Isaacs, director of federal government affairs at Hewlett-Packard, said what the company is trying to do is to reduce the impacts of their own operations and their products and to influence the policy-making process.
"We are trying to reduce energy consumption of servers and [fan] blades, work on power management features for notebooks and PCs and decrease the paper consumption by introducing duplex [double-sided] printing," he said.
Influencing environmental policy is important to HP because businesses need certainty of environmental laws so they can plan ahead, Isaacs said.
Marguerite Harden, a graduate student in the School of International Service, said she thought the discussion was interesting.
"It was interesting to hear that HP is trying to get involved in the policy making process. That was new to me," she said.
SIS professor Simon Nicholson, who teaches in the Global Environmental Politics program at AU, said it was an interesting event because both speakers talked very practical about what their organizations are doing about the climate change.
The WWF forecasts a temperature rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years, said Chatterjee. In order to limit the implications of climate change, the WWF lobbies for keeping the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius.
AU's "Climate Change Roadshow" was the series' sixth event, which started in February.
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