The end of the Road to Rio+20?

The end of our Road to Rio+20:

I know, I know – the Road to Rio+20 doesn’t really end until June next year, but our European Commission project ends next month, and the deadline for Civil Society input to the Rio+20 Focussed Political Statement falls next Monday November 1^st.  So I am feeling that the first stage of this challenging journey is coming to an end.

Rough Road: With the collapse of the CSD-19 talks at the UN in May and the almost total pre-occupation of our politicians with the financial, rather than the environmental, crisis, the road’s been a bit bumpy, hasn’t it?  But I’ve learned a lot from our 30+ Youth Prepcoms. I am more than ever convinced that next year, 2012, is a turning point year – the year when the world bids “Farewell!” to the Brown Economy based on fossil fuels and greets the new dawn of the clean, Green Economy based on renewable energy.  Avoiding climate change is the immediate incentive: we are told that if we burn just 60% of the oil reserves we know we have, we shall trigger catastrophic global warming. (So why are we prospecting for any more in fragile environments like the Arctic?!) But the most important reason for making the transition is the priority of Poverty eradication. History demonstrates that poverty has never been eradicated except in times of cheap and abundant energy. And one thing we know for sure is that fossil fuels will never again be either cheap or abundant.

Getting ahead: So – we have to make that transition. Every year we delay, the price of transition goes up – according to Nicholas Stern who prepared a detailed report for the British Government.  The British, like so many other governments, have been distracted by other issues and, like those others, have delayed as those other issues take precedence. Some governments have pushed forward: Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Israel, New Zealand – eager to free themselves from dependency on fossil fuels, have ambitious plans to green their economies. They are the lucky ones for they will come to Rio+20 with the experience to take up the mantle of leadership – where other, bigger economies, will be merely followers.

A Race to the Top:  Rio+20 must launch a virtuous circle – a race to the top to be the first, completely zero carbon, green National economy on the planet. As fossil fuels run out, and green energy becomes the norm – they will become the trail-blazers, and their companies will prosper because they have worked through the teething problems of what, inevitably, will be an immensely complex transition. But every country has to get there if they are to remain competitive in the declining years of the fossil fuel era: those that don’t will get left behind, as their high energy consuming manufacturing industries re-locate to the countries with the cheapest energy.

National rather than Global Transition Plans: The young people in our prepcoms realised very quickly that you cannot legislate globally for the Green Economy transition: the UN does not levy taxes, neither does it provide subsidies. UN efforts to prosecute polluters, set up Emissions Trading Systems – or to give us a few more years of fossil fuel by encouraging investments in Carbon Capture and Storage – all this is a waste of time and money. We have to bite the bullet and set National transition targets for the immediate transition to the Green energy sources – incentivising, rather more successfully than we have to date, through pricing mechanisms, sustainable energy production and consumption, while making fossil fuel energy ever more expensive through green taxes.

Comprehensive Transition Plans: That’s the easy bit of any Green Transition plan: do the math – calculate the total energy consumed by the different sectors of society – then figure out how you are going to provide that same amount of energy from renewable sources. The other parts of the Green Economy – fisheries, agriculture, eco-system and bio-diversity conservation, coastal zone management, welfare, education, health care, care for the elderly, the disabled, the long-term sick – all these are huge challenges, especially with a shrinking workforce struggling to support an expanding population of retired people.  The arithmetic simply does not add up. And what are we going to do about the $600 bn. a year advertising industry – that urges us, from every media orifice, to consume, consume, consume – while the sustainability imperative requires us to cease and desist from consumption? These are huge problems – but every national Green Economy transition plan must address them.

Youth-created Transition plans: if governments are not going to write them, my suggestion is that groups of young people, mentored by academics and interested politicians, should do so! And they should promote them to the media when the Rio+20 summit is going on. They should include the other issues that emerged from our Youth Prepcoms and weave them into National Green Economy Transition plans. Chief amongst them are:

Peace and an end to corruption:  A Green Economy has to be a peaceful, demilitarised economy. Israel may transition rapidly to a booming solar-driven economy, but – without peace with its neighbours – its transition will be under constant threat. Likewise, a developing country may make the most perfect plans for transition to a Green Economy, but if the money to pay for that transition is for ever being  lost to back-handers and corruption, the transition will never be made. Such recommendations rarely end up in UN or Government documents – but they are vital none-the-less, and I applaud the youth delegates to our prepcoms for raising them.

Quick Wins! 1) Beyond GDP – a new way to measure sustainable societies; 2) remove harmful subsidies; 3) promote resource efficiency …  these 3 x goals have won warm reviews from all stake-holders including the Youth. So too does the idea of a World Environment Organisation – and the clustering of the MEAs into a single-figure total of agencies, mostly under one WEO roof. So let us hope these eminently sensible suggestions make it to the Focussed Political Statement.

The Education Gap: Other issues must make it too: having spent a week at UNESCO for their World Youth Forum, none of us are any the wiser as to what their suggestions might be for expanding the penetration of Education for Sustainable Lifestyles and the training of young green economy entrepreneurs might be at Rio+20. The only idea on offer was to replace the language of the Green Economy with that of Green Societies – a bilious concept that conjures up images of whole societies going green and vomiting off the decks of some storm-tossed ferry boat.

The Education Priority: Every one of our Youth Prepcoms called for education about sustainability issues to be at the heart of every student’s curriculum from the moment they enter primary school to the day they graduate college. Sustainability – in the context of a planetary population rocketing towards 9.3 bn by mid-century – has to be the biggest challenge facing the current generation of young people and yet, almost all of them deplored the fact that they know next to nothing about any of it. They urged that the subject be at the heart of the assessed curriculum – not marginalised as ‘citizenship’ or some part-time ‘global knowledge’ agenda.

Training: training for Green jobs is equally high on the youth agenda: the events of the Arab Spring throw into sharp focus the degree of sacrifice that young people are prepared to make for the sake of securing decent work. It is a massive, massive crisis: 1.2 billion young people heading for the job market in the next decade with, at most, 300 million jobs awaiting them. What are the other 900m going to do??  Green Entrepreneurship has to be part of the solution: we know that investments in the green, low-carbon economy generally deliver double the number of jobs as investments in traditional brown or nuclear economy. There has to be a revolution in our Education and Training regimes – and, if UNESCO is not going to lead that charge, some one else in the UN system has to do it. Maybe the youth themselves?

The  Emphasis on Jobs:  For me, the only way out of the Economic Crisis is to create millions of jobs for youth! Enabling youth to become tax-payers – autonomous citizens, not dependent on families or the state for hand-outs – is the way to tackle the crisis. And to achieve that, youth need to be trained in the jobs that are seeking candidates – IT jobs, design and creative and media jobs; retrofitting houses, energy efficiency jobs –  fish farming, eco-system management.  There a myriad of fields in which young people can get, or create, their own jobs.  And by doing so, they become tax-payers and so a constructive developer of the state, not a drain upon it.

Transition people:  That transition has to start with every individual on the planet – especially the young. It was disheartening to me, trying to recruit European youth to the road to RIO+20 and finding that their only interest was cars – and which one they could afford. Electorates are likely to be like that: they will vote for the candidate who is going to supply the smoothest path to the car, the home and the wide-screen TV. There are communities who are resisting the siren calls to consumerist nirvanas – the Transition towns Movement is one of the best of them. And – as Tim Jackson points out in his excellent ‘Prosperity without Growth’ – sustainable communities like Transition Towns are likely to be much happier than their rat-race-driven neighbours.

The Opportunity:  Rio+20 gives us an opportunity to come together, in our communities, in our families, in our nations to plan the next stage in human evolution: the move from the fossil fuel era to the era of sustainability. To pull it off requires considerable strength and collaboration to fight centuries of emphasis on competition. But that collaboration can – and must – start in our homes, in our own minds, and in our own aspirations. That is the central message of Rio+20: it must be a people-driven revolution, driven by the choices that thousands – millions of us – make in our schools, in our businesses, and in our supermarkets every hour of every day.

David R. Woollcombe, UN Day, Monday 24^th October 2011