International Governance for Sustainable Development

A talk to the OECD Ministerial Round Table on Sustainable Development, OECD: Paris. 2003-03-26/27

1. All wars are horrible but we learn to accommodate to them. The present war in the Middle East has particular implications for the process of sustainable development:

• it was begun in circumstances which abandoned the multilateral UN approach to international problems, and in the words of the UN Secretary-General was "not in conformity with the Charter".
• it was undertaken as a unilateral act of questionable legality, and hence has aroused opposition worldwide.
• it will have effects on the global as well as local environment, and on development generally.
• it represents a challenge to the world's industrial countries which have directly or indirectly, albeit unwittingly, created most of the world's environmental problems, to work together in resolving them.

2. What will the world look like after the war? No one can predict. Let me quote Winston Churchill:

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

All we can have in such circumstances is hope. Each of you will have your own. Mine is for a rapid return to the United Nations, and a UN directed reconstruction of Iraq. The United Nations is also more than ever necessary to help cope with such related issues as Palestine.

3. How does all this relate to the post-Johannesburg agenda? First we must be realistic about Johannesburg. The result was well described by a British journalist as, "disaster averted: opportunity lost". Multilateralism was already deep in trouble. Those of you who struggled for positive, specific results know better than most what difficulties you were contending with. The political declaration said little new, and was a triumph of repackaging. As for the plan of implementation, only time will tell its value. Of course there were good points, and you will be trying to give substance to them tomorrow. But in my view the best comment on the plan as a whole was: "Many trees but little wood."

4. Throughout the summit participants had to cope with the attitude of the most powerful country in the world.

• on the one hand was the US scientific community which had been - and still is - to the fore in many of the specific issues of sustainable development. The same goes for some individual US states.
• on the other was the Administration with its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and negative attitude on a whole range of environmental and development issues. For example as was recently written by the editor of Science magazine,

  "the non-participation of the United States in the global effort on climate change is more than a national embarrassment. It's dangerous."

• As someone once remarked to me,

  "will we remember this as the moment when the American Republic, like the Roman Republic became the American Empire, like the Roman Empire?"

5. I want now to turn to the broader background. The problems have already been discussed in the OECD (an admirable paper was leaked to the press last August). We are in a unique situation, well brought out in a recent book on the 20th century entitled Something New Under the Sun, and made specific in the Declaration made by over a thousand scientists from the four great global research programmes at Amsterdam in July 2001. There it stated squarely that:

"Human activities have the potential to switch the Earth's System to alternative modes of operation that may prove irreversible and less hospitable to humans and other life… the Earth's System has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least…The Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state".

"The accelerating human transformation of the Earth's environment is not sustainable. Therefore the business-as-usual way of dealing with the Earth's System is not an option. It has to be replaced - as soon as possible - by deliberate strategies of management that sustain the Earth's environment while meeting social and economic development objectives".

No wonder that Crutzen and Stoermer have labelled the present epoch since the beginning of the industrial revolution as the Anthropocene.

6. The growing division of humanity between rich and poor was the subject of much rhetoric but virtually no action. Advocates of market forces suggest that these will eventually bring their version of development to all. The trends suggest the opposite. In assessing progress on the Millennium Development Goals stated in July last year, the UN Secretary General well said:

"There is no autopilot, there is no magic of the market place, no rising tide of the global economy that will lift all boats, guaranteeing that all goals will be reached by 2015."

7. At present about 20% of the world's people consume between 70% and 80% of its resources. The dividing line between rich and poor is not only between countries but also within them. Even in India and China, the rift is between globalized rich and the localized poor. There has been debate whether globalization has exacerbated this divide. Successive UNDP Human Development Reports, especially that of 1999, suggest that it has.

8. Before the Johannesburg Summit took place, there was a series of Round Tables of so-called Eminent Persons from the six major regions of the world. I chaired the first of them for Europe and North America. Our main conclusions were:

• Environmental problems went far beyond the remit of governments. Citizens and governments alike had to rethink what they meant by "development" in industrial just as much as in other countries.
• Consumer ideas and behaviour everywhere were simply unsustainable. Current models for society were dangerously obsolete.
• Likely impacts of climate change in an already overcrowded world were far more serious that had so far been recognized. The implications for energy policy were critical.
• We needed new international institutions to measure up to, and coordinate the human response to the problems human actions had created.

9. I do not think that the conclusions of this as of other regional Round Tables had much effect. But I still commend them to you. Politics, as we all know, is about priorities. My own are broadly to:

• look again at economics, and the way we measure wealth, welfare and human progress in terms of the Earth's good health;
• redefine development, and give more respect to the different needs - and possibilities - of different countries;
• apply the principles of common but differentiated responsibility, accepting that industrial countries have much bigger responsibilities, and above all should give the example in their domestic policies. Getting rid of perverse subsidies would be a good start.
• underline the need for partnerships at all levels: governments, business, local communities, and establish new guidelines and codes of conduct. In some respects this is happening already.

10. I do not want to cry yet more woe. But I found deeply depressing the probable impact of current events on the Third World Water Forum held in Kyoto last week. The meeting was expected to lay out steps towards the UN goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. What has happened? Some good words and a lot of argument, but no real planning and financial commitments.

11. Wars focus the mind as little else. Whatever the reasons for them, they are immensely destructive. But they should not crowd out the need to think long and hard about sustainable development, and to return to cooperation in coping with the really big problems. Cooperation means multilateralism. It also means financial as well as other commitments. If we fail to co-operate, we shall be inviting the kind of catastrophes over water, climate, resources, pollution and the rest, which have dogged human history. Let me recall what I think is the best definition of sustainable development:

"Treating the Earth as if we intended to stay."

That should be your agenda.