Good review for President’s interview during COP26

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s interview on the side-lines of his participation at COP26 in Glasgow has received good reviews.

The interview was transmitted live from Glasgow on 6 November.

The interview at the ‘GLF Climate’ was done by World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) Centre for International Forest Research Chief Scientist and Transformative Partnership Platform on Agroecology School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University Co-Convenor Dr. Fergus L. Sinclair.

In the interview, President urged the international agricultural research community to assist Sri Lanka in making a national agroecological transition.

The European Union International Partnerships directorate has been replaying the interview as part of its internal webinar to promote work on agroecology in EU Delegations. The move was to illustrate what can be done and Sri Lanka is a good example. 

Sources said the immediate feedback from the session has been tremendous with comments like “interview of the Sri Lankan president was very clear and convincing”; “impressive discourse from the Sri Lankan President”; “at last, national leaders at COP26 rolling their sleeves up, implementing change and dealing with the consequences”; “what a refreshing session, women, youth and indigenous people going head to head with national leaders to discuss real transformative steps”; “a very well organised and focused event”; “I met a woman from Invivo who said she loved the agroecology plenary session”.  

The session will continue to be streamed and to be the feature of social media coverage over the coming weeks.The GLF Climate event saw 4,263 attendees from 144 countries (1,057 from Europe, 417 from North America, 586 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 627 from the Asia-Pacific region, 718 from Africa). There were 1,886 youth attendees of whom 52.8% of attendees were female and 43% were male. There were also 10,159 total stream views 495,000 total web page views and organisers estimate the social media reach as 30 million.