LI environment advocate at climate talks

Manhasset native and environmental advocate Katherine Rainone first encountered the front lines of climate change in the South Pacific, working with island communities where rising seas had fouled wells and washed away sea walls.

Now Rainone, 24, hopes to make her call for climate solutions heard as nations gather this week for a critical round of climate change talks in South Africa. She's one of 15 young American delegates representing a nonprofit sustainability group at the United Nations Climate Conference in Durban, which begins Monday.

Countries in attendance must decide whether to extend and possibly amend the Kyoto Protocol -- the only legally binding international agreement now in place to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which most scientists agree have triggered a rise in average global temperatures.

"I'd like to see a pledge for investment in alternative energy from developed countries," Rainone said last week, speaking via Skype from a youth hostel in Capetown, South Africa. "I'd also like to see them re-up the Kyoto Protocol because it's set to expire."

The United States signed but Congress never ratified that protocol, and its first commitment period ends in 2012. It is uncertain whether industrialized nations will agree to a new climate change treaty before 2020. The chief U.S. climate negotiator, Todd Stern, has said there is little international support for the Kyoto Protocol, and that the United States would sign on to future legally binding pacts to reduce emissions only if developing nations such as China also commit.

Rainone and other observers will be able to sit in on some parts of the talks and meet with delegates to lobby for certain actions, such as increased aid from rich countries to low-lying island nations and other places most at risk from climate change.

"It's not anything that they did on their own," she said of the vulnerable countries. "It's us as a world, putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

Rainone was selected to attend the talks by SustainUs, a nonprofit founded in North Carolina that has sent young delegates to a number of global sustainability conferences. Accredited by the UN, the group provides access and covers some costs of travel and lodging, said spokesman Mitch Lowenthal.

A 2005 Manhasset High School graduate, Rainone lives in Washington, D.C., where she works at a consulting firm that helps environmental and other nonprofit groups with fundraising. She is also studying for a master's in environmental planning and management at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Rainone became interested in environmental issues after she learned to sail the waters of Long Island Sound at age 13, her family said.

"It seemed to start because she felt at one with the water," said her mother, Maryanne Rainone of Manhasset. "She didn't want anything to happen to it, so that was the germ of it."

During college, also at Johns Hopkins, Rainone interned at the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and spent two weeks working at an organic farm in Michigan.

Last summer, Rainone immersed herself further in environmental work. She signed on with OceansWatch International, a New Zealand group that does marine monitoring in the South Pacific, and sailed from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

The team removed invasive species from reefs and tracked the decline of fish. Members gathered data on changing harvest seasons, and noted the growing number of wells contaminated by saltwater.

At Tuo village in the Solomon Islands, residents took Rainone to see an ancestral graveyard where centuries-old plots were being washed away as rising waters erode sea walls and threaten homes.

"You could see skulls rolling up on the beach, and a lot of the elders were really upset," Rainone said. "They're losing places of importance."