John Culatto
ORDINARY people in Gibraltar have the power to make a difference in the fight against climate change, the director of a company that won this year’s Sustainable Awards said.
OTWO’s Managing and Commercial Director Vanessa Byrne told The Olive Press that Gibraltarians need to look in the mirror and see what they can change in their daily life.
The sustainable magazine she runs along with designer and creative director Juanjo Trujillo, took first prize in the Gibraltar Sustainable Awards hosted by the government and The Nautilus Project.
And now, she opened up about how she believes that even though it might all be a bit overwhelming, a small change helps.
“We cannot be stuck with pointing the fingers at bigger corporations,” Byrne said.
“We can point those fingers, but we can also point them back at ourselves”
She said that about a quarter of pollution is from traffic and that is one area which, she suggests, is caused by traffic and transport.
Byrne raised the difference between traffic levels during the school mid-term and most school days from parents taking dropping their children off.
“I live here and work here, I have kids I understand it,” she said.
“And they’re saying ‘I’ll stop using my car when they stop letting the cars come in through the border because that’s where the majority of the traffic is coming from’”.
And she reasoned that Gibraltar could have had its city centre are become a car-free zone or used a park-and-ride solution.
“If being mid-term there hasn’t been any traffic whatsoever in Gibraltar, where’s the traffic coming from?
“Is it really from the border? Or is it from people going to schools in their car? “Working people have taken time off, but it’s not like everything stopped – it’s just school’s closed.”
The alternatives are bus, walking or cycling, but using a car to drop the kids off cause too many fumes, she suggests.
Her views line up with the drop of car use during the pandemic year of 2020 when schools shut for a few months.
“We can’t stay stuck waiting for the powers that be to make the decisions for us,” she concluded.
“We need to make the changes that we need to make now.”
Byrne explained her sustainable vision for Gibraltar on the GBC chatshow ‘The Hub’ recently.
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