Our Planet - Volume 2016, Issue 1, 2017

A decade ago, when I took up my appointment as Executive Director of UNEP, the economic, social and environmental landscape looked very different. The world was wedded to a paradigm of at-all-costs economic development. Social concerns – health, equality, justice – had little integration with economic concerns. Climate change and environmental degradation were gaining traction as global issues, but were more often than not treated as discrete challenges.

I’d first like to pay tribute to Maurice Strong, an accomplished, industrious Canadian who passed away last November. He was the guiding force behind the 1972 Stockholm Conference, where the foundations of UNEP were created, and he was also UNEP’s first Executive Director. Canada is proud of Maurice Strong’s legacy and of the contribution he made to the founding of this great institution.

The evidence is irrefutable: the climate is changing, generating a range of environmental, social and economic problems. Without a doubt, climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. The broad consensus is that the cause is human activity, and specifically how we fuel our economies. We have become, ironically, our own worst enemies. Put simply, our current consumption and production patterns are unsustainable, and the consequences will be felt by our children and grandchildren. Urgent action is needed.

Historically, Costa Rica has been proactive in climate change negotiations. It announced in 2007 its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2021. And in September last year, in its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), the country proposed ambitious emissions reductions and climate action through the year 2050, setting the country on a path towards an effective de-carbonization of its economy.

Although industrial economies remain at the heart of the world’s sustainability challenges, emerging economies are playing an increasingly prominent role in influencing global sustainable development.

In September last year the United Nations General Assembly adopted a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be met by the year 2030. These range from poverty eradication and improvements in education and health to the protection of global assets, including the oceans and a stable climate. However, neither the SDGs nor their background documents explain how governments should judge the sustainability of the development programmes they undertake to meet the goals. It is currently taken as a given that the only way the SDGs can be met is for the world economy to enjoy healthy rates of economic growth. Unfortunately it is universal practice to interpret economic growth as growth in gross domestic product (GDP).

Climate change and air pollution are not problems for just one country, one city or one town. The melting of the Arctic threatens the survival of polar bears, and the city of Seoul shares responsibility for this. This is a challenge and pending problem for every single person to resolve; it will become a theme for everyone.

Open access to data and knowledge is fundamental to the transition to a vibrant and inclusive green economy. Such access enables all stakeholders to better understand and participate in the collection, use and analysis of data. That’s why UNEP has developed UNEP Live (uneplive.unep.org), a web-based knowledge management platform, that gives users access to substantiated, contextualized data about sustainable consumption and production patterns and economic performance. Such information, which looks beyond growth in income and GDP to include human well-being, can be a powerful tool for policy-makers.

People across the globe celebrated the signing of the United Nations climate accord in Paris in December. It was truly a landmark event and I was proud to be a part of the Local Climate Leaders Circle of Mayors representing my city and others across the United States.

The Chinese government always attaches great importance to environmental protection, adopting a series of major measures in promoting sustainable development. Since the turn of the 21st century, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council have been vigorously progressing sustainable development from both theoretical and practical perspectives with remarkable achievements.

The Paris Agreement has sent clear signals to markets and to the financial sector that more than 190 countries are going to vigorously pursue the transition to a low-carbon economy that’s resilient to mounting climate change. It is no longer a question of if this transition will happen, but of how fast. Some of the key changes required lie outside the financial sector, such as changing relative prices of harmful goods and services vis-à-vis those that benefit the environment and the development of new technologies to facilitate changes in consumption patterns. Finance, however, has an important role to play.

Women form a large proportion of the agricultural labour force in sub-Saharan Africa and play a vital role in ensuring family nutrition and food security. But gender-based inequalities in access to and control of productive and financial resources are inhibiting agricultural productivity and reducing food security. At the same time, a changing climate means that there is a shrinking window to close the gender gap in agriculture and seize the prospects for promoting women’s empowerment, economic development and resilience to shocks.

You may not have felt the ground shaking, but the energy world underwent a seismic shift in 2015. The impacts of the Paris climate agreement, and other energy policy advances, on people everywhere in the world and at every level of the economy will be beneficial and profound. Last year launched us all in into the 21st-century clean energy economy, and 2016 is the year that true democratization of energy begins.

The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population now controls 50 per cent of global assets, while the poorest half owns just 1 per cent – and that gap is set to widen. At the same time, 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystems are degraded. If ever there was a need to rewrite the economic rulebook, it’s now.

It’s good that the discourse on the green economy is starting to put more of an emphasis on inclusion, viewing the benefits of transition not just from an environmental perspective, but also for its social and economic outcomes. But if we are going to achieve an inclusive green economy, we must first be inclusive in shaping its agenda.

Back in March 2007, during his annual presentation of the government’s economic proposals in Parliament, the then Prime Minister of Barbados, the Rt. Hon Owen Arthur, used these words to launch a comprehensive National Green Economy Policy for Barbados. The policy was designed “to integrate green principles into national economic planning, marrying economic growth with environmental management and preservation.”

Agricultural systems deliver many benefits to society. An industrial cornfield in the United States might yield several hundred bushels of corn per year for processing into foodstuffs, animal grain or ethanol, which could be exported and consumed halfway across the planet. Meanwhile, a cooperative of small-scale cocoa farms in the Congo Basin could feed up to 80 per cent of the local population, employ dozens of producers and sustain the livelihoods of countless local families.

Two major threats face the world: environmental degradation and the growing gap between rich and poor. Historical and contemporary evidence indicates that they are symptomatic of a growing structural imbalance in all economies – how nature is exploited to create wealth and how it is shared among the population. The root of this imbalance is that natural capital is under-priced, and hence overly exploited, whereas human capital is insufficient to meet demand, thus encouraging relatively higher wages for skilled labour and wealth inequality.

Most of us go up or down in the world, but for Bertrand Piccard the alternatives were particularly acute. His grandfather, Auguste Piccard, set altitude records by balloon, becoming the first person to enter the stratosphere and thus observe the curvature of the Earth. And his father, Jacques, set the submarine depth record by descending nearly 11,000 metres to touch the bottom of the Mariana Trench.