Could a Woman from a Small, Developing Country End Rescue the Climate Change Negotiations?

Could a Woman from a Small, Developing Country End Rescue the Climate Change Negotiations

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Copyright (c) 2010 Alison WithersMany people were hugely disappointed by the feeble outcome of the December 2009 Climate change talks in Copenhagen.Now, however, the UN's appointment of Costa Rican Christiana Figueres as the new head of the Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC ) offers some hope that new energy will be injected into the process before its next meeting in Mexico in December 2010.The Earth Summit in Rio almost 20 years ago first focused attention on the environmental damage human activity was doing to the planet, although many of the problems had been on the international agenda for decades, some from as far back as the Stockholm environmental conference in 1972.Ms Figueres has a lot to do, much of it very quickly. Rebuilding confidence in the UN negotiation process before the Mexico summit is most urgent, as is trying to focus delegates' attention on the the increasing urgency of reaching global agreement on action.Every day some new horror story emerges to underline the situation, most recently the UN's third Global Biodiversity Outlook report, which said that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" which could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death all of which, it warned, could soon begin to have an impact on national economies.Actually it's economics that are at the heart of the climate change disagreements. They are listed in a discussion on the BBC's website by Maurice Strong, who was secretary general of the 1972 Swedish conference, and Felix Dodds, Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum.They say that human societies are living beyond the planet's carrying capacity, with climate change emerging as an out-of-control driver of many of the world's environmental and economic crises.One example of what this means to individual citizens is that basic needs like food have become ever more expensive as food scarcity threatens, particularly in developing countries. At the same time "green" consumers in the developed world are increasingly demanding natural, healthier food.All this puts even greater pressure on the land to increase farm food production to feed a growing global population.This situation is one good example of the way in which economics and the environment, in this case food production, are intimately connected and impacting on the climate change debate.As part of their strategy to tackle environmental issues and climate change governments could invest in and agree globally on regulation to speed up the introduction of the new generation of low-chem, environmentally friendly agricultural products being created by Biopesticides Developers that could enable farmers to increase their land's yield sustainably and meet the demand for affordable healthy food. Some do, but not nearly enough and not in harmony with each other.It all has its roots in the competitive nature of the outdated model of continuous economic growth as the way to deliver fairness and prosperity to the disadvantaged that practically all national governments place their faith in.Yet, as the global economic crisis should have warned us, it's plainly failed to deliver while the gap between rich and poor has grown despite governments' efforts.Since at least 1993 the continuous growth model has been questioned, by Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend (Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem) by Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen, and Muhammad Yunus, also a Nobel Laureate and founder of the microcredit Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.In the UK in 2009 Prof Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner for the Sustainable Development Commission, wrote that a macro-economy depending on continual expansion of debt-driven materialistic consumption is ecologically unsustainable, socially problematic and economically unstable.So Ms Figueres faces another, equally urgent challenge in Mexico - to get the world's leaders to focus on changing the unsustainable economic models that are threatening the environment and human survival.It's to be hoped that a woman, and one from a smaller developing country, may be able to bring a new perspective and understanding that will finally shift the entrenched positions between developed, developing and emerging national economies that have brought the annual climate change negotiations to stalemate.

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