The central principle we need to get acknowledged, we said, is that water, as a supremely important resource for all mankind, is common property and access to it must be declared a basic human right. This view was widely endorsed and the governments of many countries, as well as a number of business leaders, spoke out in support of it.
I was well aware, needless to say, that international acceptance of a human right to water was not the end of the problem. In order to ensure effectively that hundreds of millions of people have access to clean water, the right needs to be enshrined in national legislation. Providing people with water and sanitary conditions is critically important for solving such other problems of developing countries as education, health and regulation of the birth rate. There is also a direct connection with security.
In March 2012 I was invited to speak at the Sixth World Water Forum in Marseille. My main points were that water, unlike other resources, has no substitutes. The fresh water resources available to us are finite, and water consumption is increasing. It is no longer possible for consumption to continue to grow at the rates seen in the twentieth century. The situation in poor countries, where millions of people die prematurely from drinking untreated water, is becoming completely unacceptable.
Green Cross International launched a Water for Life initiative that proposed developing an international convention on the right to water. It took many years to accomplish this but, finally, in 2010, the United Nations did adopt a resolution to include the right to water and sanitation as a fundamental human right. The international community found it difficult to agree on this important step, but eventually took it.
Practical implementation of the principle is even more difficult. Only a few countries have included the right of access to water in their national legislation. One of these is France, which also devotes considerable resources to ensure access to water in developing countries. Green Cross International for its part has been actively involved in developing measures for the conservation and rational management of water resources.
Even quite simple solutions that do not require huge investment can save many human lives. As the result of just one Green Cross International pilot programme in Ghana, 40,000 people living in the Volta River Basin have gained access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Another important area for our efforts is preventing conflicts over access to water resources, and exploitation of them as a means to exert political pressure or enforce ultimatums.
The threat of climate change
Another critical issue, which in the past decades has come to the fore in world politics, is global climate change resulting from the scaling up of human economic activities. The situation was deteriorating dramatically year by year, and at the Earth Dialogues meeting in Australia, I complained that world leaders were ignoring the climate crisis.
Every year brings further evidence that global warming, in which, in the view of most scientists, the main role is played by human activities, is causing anomalous weather patterns, leading to loss of life and bringing with it severe economic and social consequences. The 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer heat waves have by no means been the only disaster. Mudslides in China, unprecedented drought in Australia and India, floods in Pakistan and Central Europe – the list could easily be continued.
Meanwhile, nations continue to do nothing. This is the result not only of a lack of political will, but also of the fact that lavishly financed corporate lobbying and the energy business, wary of having to pay more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, have at their disposal financial resources far in excess of what is available to those supporting urgent measures to combat global warming. Every year states spend hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing the hydrocarbon (oil, gas, coal) sector of the energy industry. Assuredly, representatives of the G20 leading economies of the world have pledged to gradually phase out these subsidies, but only ‘in the medium term’.
Public opinion is increasingly disillusioned and losing faith in the ability of states to take effective action to counter climate change. From losing faith, it is a short step to losing interest and becoming apathetic.
The Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference in 2009 did not live up to expectations. Because of substantial disagreements between developed and developing countries, it proved impossible to reach a global agreement on the issue to replace the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012. After the Copenhagen conference everything started going downhill. A tendency became noticeable in formal negotiations to move away from the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The impression is that those involved are more interested in trying ‘not to raise the stakes’ than to achieve worthwhile results. The diplomats and experts get bogged down in technical details, and voices are increasingly heard in favour of agreeing to a lowest common denominator. It is being suggested that perhaps it would be good enough to accept a target increase in the Earth’s temperature during the twenty-first century of over 4°C. That is twice as much as the upper limit of 2°C urged by climate scientists and officially agreed by the leaders of the G8 and other countries.
I will not settle for that, any more than I can accept proposals to hand the debate over to the business community in the hope that some purely technocratic solution can be found there. Of course, business, with its ability to adapt new technologies to its advantage, can and must play a major role in the transition to a low-carbon economy, but to hope that in the process it may become the main engine of change is, to say the least, naive. The development of alternative and renewable sources of energy is sluggish. Progress in individual countries has little impact on the global situation. After all that has happened to the global economy in recent years, few people are likely to credit claims that the free market can solve all the problems.
The answer is for states to show collective political leadership and responsibility. They must take on a political commitment commensurate with the seriousness of the threat. We have to resolve the problem of ‘climate injustice’, where climate change has the most serious consequences for developing countries that do not have the resources necessary to counter them. The leaders of Western countries need honestly to admit the scale of the challenge and the need for systemic rather than cosmetic measures. A new global agreement must be based on scientific data, not on a compromise between group interests.
The major developing countries, by now comparable in terms of emissions with the industrialized countries, need also to take on serious commitments. The growth of the economic power of countries like China, India and Brazil must be matched by growth in their sense of ecological responsibility. Joining the fight against climate change is in their own interests. It is, nevertheless, for the rich countries to act first. Their inaction over the past 20 years gives them no right to lecture others on the subject.