| |
Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
“Asia wants to protect itself from financial crises”
WTO bans politically motivated trade preferences
Poverty reduction must fail without women’s participation
“The ability to share must be acquired anew”
‘Washington Consensus’ was not meant to be a term for neoliberalism
2/2004 |
|
[ Standstill in environmental policy ]
“The ability to share must be acquired anew”
Ideas on how the blockades in international environmental policy could be overcome are often visionary and creative. However, the people who propose them are mostly at a loss when it comes to naming practical political steps to get closer to the goal of sustainability at international level. One idea is that an ‘eco-dictatorship’ might remedy the standstill following the Johannesburg conference on sustainable development and the long and vain wait for Russian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. But none of the participants at a discussion organised by the Sustainability Foundation, the North-South initiative Germanwatch and the German Development Bank KfW in Berlin in mid-December was inclined to pursue it. Nevertheless, the German Social Democratic Party Federal MP and former President of the Wuppertal Institute, Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker, who was happy to drop his role as moderator to join the debate, said the democratic system would prove itself to be superior only if it found sustainable solutions to pressing social and ecological problems.
Earlier, the Iranian UN diplomat Hussein Moeini, who coordinated the G77 group of developing countries in Johannesburg and is currently helping to prepare the Bonn conference on renewable energy (renewables 2004), spoke out against the widespread scepticism. True, he too complained about the general lack of willingness to implement ecological plans. But, he said, following Johannesburg, understanding for environmental issues had grown among the developing countries. A new era had begun. Chris Flavin, President of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, also spoke about that, although under different conditions. He dated the beginning of the new era as September 11, 2001. Since then, he said, security issues had preoccupied official thinking and focused everything on the anxious question of where the next crisis would break out. Yet the big global challenges had remained the same: the growing poverty in rural areas and in the megacities, to which more and more young people without prospects were streaming; the waste of non-renewable resources; and the general uncertainty on energy policy against the background of global climate change.
Flavin said that since it was difficult to reach agreement among the 190 UN member countries on urgent environmental protection measures, the “leadership countries” must take the initiative. Germanwatch Chairman Michael Windfuhr also called for a “regulative policy” in the fight against poverty. He said the ability to share must be acquired anew.
Johannes Wendt
Further reading: Climate Protection Strategies for the 21st Century. Kyoto and Beyond. Special Report by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). On the Internet: www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2003_engl.html
|
