A negotiator’s toolkit
Joe Burlington welcomes a timely and needed publication
As floods, droughts and wildfires can neither be ignored nor rationally explained away, government departments – in every country – require ‘concise arguments for urgent climate action’.
Ministers at climate change conferences need the most up-to-date findings available. A Negotiator’s Toolkit: Engaging busy Ministries with concise arguments for urgent climate action, which is edited by Lindsey Fielder Cook and Isobel Edwards of the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) in Geneva, provides them. These are not opinions – every point has a reference to published research. Nine of ten sections address ‘Arguments’ related to topics like ‘Economics and Food Security,’ but light is shone on less discussed issues, such as ‘Gender’, ‘Health’ and ‘Civil Society’.
‘The Climate Science Argument’ reveals that ‘global emissions from fossil fuels and industry’ are now sixty-two per cent higher than when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change alerted the world to the problem in 1990. How many of us knew that, after twenty-eight years, emissions are not falling steadily as expected, but are in fact higher by a large proportion?
Equally remarkable is a 2009 statement by professor Tim Jackson quoted in ‘The Economic Argument’: ‘The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago, and has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated sixty per cent of the world’s ecosystems,’ which ‘is totally at odds with the finite resources and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival.’ It is hard to take in – we have debased three-fifths of the world’s wildlife! After that, it may not be surprising to know that: ‘Seven of the ten costliest years since 1950 for global weather catastrophes occurred between 2000 and 2014’ – facts ignored by conventional economic ‘wisdom’.
‘The Peace and Conflict Argument’ includes: ‘Over the long term, climate change will result in more disruption, more instability and more displacement as impacts intensify. There is an emerging global consensus that climate change will stress economic, social, and political systems that underpin each nation state’. The authors have kept each entry brief but one reference for this point refers to a paper with the title: How Climate Change is Behind the Surge of Migrants to Europe – a thought as pertinent for attitudes to refugees aiming for Europe as for those at the Mexican/USA border.
An item in ‘The Ethical Argument’ is: ‘A transformation is needed in our behaviours, lifestyles, and our political and economic systems…’ In September, QUNO hopes to publish a version of this Toolkit intended for activists. I hope it will address the question of how ‘behaviours’, among other issues, might be changed.
The tenth section, ‘Urgent Mitigation Policy’, concludes with the thought that a political choice to focus on ‘end-of pipe geoengineering technologies’ implies ‘that it is more acceptable to risk irreparable harm to our planet than alter the dominant economic system’.
‘Eventually only our sense of the sacred will save us,’ so that we can ‘live more sustainably and fairly, and flourish on the Earth’. (The first quote is by the ‘Earth scholar’ Thomas Berry; the second is from Shopping for Sustainability by Gill Seyfang of the University of East Anglia.)
Just as it says on the cover, A Negotiator’s Toolkit provides ‘concise arguments for urgent climate action’. The Quaker United Nations Office has done what is needed – and done it well.
A Negotiator’s Toolkit: Engaging busy Ministries with concise arguments for urgent climate action is edited by Lindsey Fielder Cook and Isobel Edwards. It is available from the QUNO website: www.quno.org
