Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A future worth choosing
Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act
UN panel aims for ‘a future worth choosing’
A BBC news article about the report by Richard Black
The High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability was established in 2010 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Its report will feed into discussions leading to the Rio+20 summit in June. It is being launched in Addis Ababa by its two co-chairs, Finnish President Tarja Halonen and her South African counterpart Jacob Zuma. “With the possibility of the world slipping further into recession, policymakers are hungry for ideas that can help them to navigate these difficult times,” said Mr Zuma. “Our report makes clear that sustainable development is more important than ever given the multiple crises now enveloping the world.” Ms Halonen emphasised the theme of equality that runs through the report, in terms of gender and redressing the burgeoning gap between people on high and low incomes. “Eradication of poverty and improving equity must remain priorities for the world community,” she said.
UN Report
The panel’s diagnosis:
- The number of people living in poverty is declining, but the number hungry is rising
- Inequality in wealth distribution is rising
- Access to clean water is increasing, but 2.6 billion people lack access to modern sanitation
- By 2030, demand for food will rise by 50%, for energy by 45% and for water by 30%
- Women are too often excluded from economic opportunities
- The financial crisis was partly caused by market rules that encourage short-termism and do not reward sustainable investment
- The current economic model is “pushing us inexorably towards the limits of natural resources and planetary life support systems”
The panel’s 22 members include heads of government and ministers past and present, including Barbadian Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, Australian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and India’s Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh. They also include Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister who led the Brundtland Commission in 1987. It was that report that coined the most familiar definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Twenty-five years on, the new report concludes that although substantial progress has been made in many directions, such as reducing poverty, development is anything but sustainable. “We undertook this report during a period of global volatility and uncertainty,” it says. “Economies are teetering. Inequality is growing. And global temperatures continue to rise. “We are testing the capacity of the planet to sustain us.” To turn this around, it says: “We need to change dramatically, beginning with how we think about our relationship to each other, to future generations, and to the ecosystems that support us”.