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	The quest for profit is transforming the natural world by Nicholas Stern, Margi Prideaux The Observer, Open Democracy   Nicholas Stern: cost of global warming ‘is worse than I feared’.   Ten years ago the leading economist warned about climate change in a landmark report – he says while there is cause for optimism, the picture is still grim, writes Robin McKie for The Observer.   A lot has happened since Nicholas Stern, then a permanent secretary at the British Treasury, produced his landmark review of the impact of climate change 10 years ago. His work was quickly recognised as the definitive account of the economic dangers posed to the planet by global warming.   Since then, global temperatures have risen to record levels. Arctic summer sea ice has continued to shrink, as have many major land-based ice sheets. Carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere in ever-increasing amounts.   At the same time, low-lying coastal areas, such as south Florida and parts of Bangladesh, are experiencing more and more flooding as sea levels have risen. Scientists have begun to link extreme weather events to the planet’s changing climate, while animal and plant species are gradualling moving towards the poles.   So, a decade on, is Stern plunged in despair over our prospects? Not quite. While the picture is certainly grim, the world’s top climate economist still believes there are grounds for modest optimism.   “We have been too slow in acting on climate change,” he told the Observer. “In particular, we have delayed the curbing of greenhouse gas emissions for far too long. When we published our review, emissions were equivalent to the pumping of 40-41bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year. Today there are around 50bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. At the same time, science is telling us that impacts of global warming – like ice sheet and glacier melting – are now happening much more quickly than we anticipated.”   In his report, published in October 2006, Stern warned that the cost of inaction would be far greater for future generations than the costs of actions taken today. “With hindsight, I now realise that I underestimated the risks. I should have been much stronger in what I said in the report about the costs of inaction. I underplayed the dangers.”   These are stark remarks. Yet the dramatic success of the Paris climate talks last year, and their subsequent rapid ratification by more than 90 countries, has provided the 70-year-old economist with a sense of hope: “It has taken only 11 months to get the Paris agreement ratified. It took eight years to get its predecessor, the Kyoto protocol, into force. So in a sense, the last 12 months have been encouraging.”   In his review, Stern made a cogent case for the need to make drastic reductions in fossil fuel burning to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, which are heating our atmosphere dangerously. The costs involved – in investing in the development of alternative energy sources, for example – would be far outweighed by the costs of coping with an overheated world afflicted by flooding, soaring temperatures, ruined crops and farmland, lack of food and displaced people, he argued. Most experts responded positively to the review.   Yet the world is still burning more and more fossil fuel and pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This has both long- and short-term consequences.   “Apart from raising carbon levels and temperatures, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution, as we have learned over the past five years,” says Stern. “The consequences are terrible. Air pollution kills more than 30,000 people a year in Britain. That is about one in 2,000 of the population. It has become one of the very big killers around the world. In China, it causes about 4,000 deaths a day.   “We are killing millions every year from air pollution produced by burning fossil fuels. Yes, there are other sources of air pollution but burning fossil fuels is a large part of the story. That understanding is new and very important.”   As a counterbalance, Stern points to the fact that in recent years there has been an encouraging increase in the use of sustainable technologies that should help us to wean us of our fossil fuel dependency. Cities like Barcelona and Bogotá have made themselves cleaner and healthier. Coal burning has peaked in China. Hybrid cars and electric vehicles are being sold in increasing numbers and the cost of making solar panels has been reduced by a factor of 20.   “We have reached the point where we can now see that the alternative route is not really something that should be regarded as a cost. It is actually a much better way of doing things, even if you had never heard of climate change,” says Stern.   But the message has taken too long to sink in, and as result we are approaching a crunch point, he argues. In the next 20 years, as economies across the globe expand, the planet is likely to build infrastructure – roads, buildings, ports and airports – that will more than double what already exists.   The crucial issue is the nature of that infrastructure. “If it is dirty and high carbon, it will lock us into that technology for a long time. We will be sentenced to live in cities where we cannot breath or move or be productive. If we do it using sustainable technology, however, we could have an extremely attractive future where you have strong growth, poverty is reduced, cities are cleaner and forests are saved. People have not sufficiently understood the importance of the next 20 years. They are going to be the most decisive two decades in human history.”   Last year’s Paris climate deal suggests there is a will to avoid the worst and there is a prospect of further strong agreements being reached at this month’s talks in Marrakech. India, China and the US have all made positive noises. Hillary Clinton is a firm supporter of climate change initiatives – but what if Donald Trump is elected president? This is a man who has claimed the concept of global warming was created “by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing noncompetitive” and who has pledged to tear up the Paris agreement. Stern’s response is diplomatic: “It would make things very much more difficult,” he says.   The Paris agreement remains central to Stern’s sense of cautious optimism. “It was the honesty of the delegates’ awareness of the nature of the problem and the speed of the agreement’s ratification that has given me most hope. We have a lot to do to limit carbon emissions to an effective level. I am confident that it is possible to achieve that, though I cannot say that I am confident it will happen.”   When a tiger has no value. The quest for profit is transforming the natural world. Can it be halted, asks Dr. Margi Prideaux writing for Open Democracy.   A few weeks ago the World Wide Fund for Nature released their latest Living Planet Report. Its findings have reverberated around the world, with the bleak news that the 3,706 wildlife populations that are actively monitored by scientists have declined by an average of 58 per cent since 1970 because of agriculture, fisheries, mining and other human activities. The report’s authors predict that this figure will reach 67 per cent by the end of the decade. How on earth has this happened?   The answer that’s often put forward is that wildlife protection laws in the ‘lawless’ regions of the world are woefully inadequate (meaning large swathes of Africa and Asia), but the true root of the problem is that nature is being monetized in order to generate profits for investors and corporations in a process that’s facilitated by changes in the structure of global governance—and it’s about to get much worse.   Unless we get to grips with the real issues at stake, the destruction of nature is all-but guaranteed, except in those few parts of the world that are set aside as reserves for the enjoyment of wealthy visitors.   Since European countries first reached out and colonized distant lands, Africa, Asia and Latin America have been a ‘resource hinterland’ for global capitalism, an economic system that has transferred wealth from poor to rich countries through the extraction of mineral and biological resources.   Large areas of forest have been cleared to make way for the mono-culture of crops like palm oil, soya bean, biofuels and timber on a massive scale. Mining carves ruinous scars across whole landscapes, poisoning the water for both people and wildlife downstream. And large factory ships are plundering fisheries for the tables of the world’s elite.   This system robs the world of the biodiversity we collectively need to survive. More poignantly, it robs communities in Africa, Asia, South America and the Arctic of their rights, resources and connections with their environments and the wildlife they contain. These are the very communities who still retain the wisdom and experience to protect the world’s wild places.   Many people who have stood against this tide have been evicted from their ancestral lands. Some have been murdered. Global Witness has documented the fact that that more than three people were killed each week during 2015 defending their lands, forests and rivers against destructive industries.   Yet the profits that are made from these industries are more than enough to maintain the forward momentum of the system. More money flows from these hinterland economies each year than they receive in foreign direct investment and foreign aid combined. In 2011, for example, oil, gas and mineral exports from Africa were worth US$382 billion more than eight times the value of development aid received by African countries in that year.   This money streams through mechanisms for cross-border accounting, tax evasion and the repatriation of profits that are designed and maintained by wealthy countries; facilitated by the institutional secrecy that is built into the global financial system; and controlled by corporate elites. In a shadow economy that flows alongside the economy we see, commercial tax dodgers and criminals shift vast amounts of money across international borders quickly, easily and largely undetected. Hundreds of billions of dollars pour into western coffers each year, from both streams, leaving little behind for those whose lands and wildlife have been plundered.   The only way to reverse this process is to institute a system of global governance that actually does what it says, govern the extraction of natural resources, the destruction of wildlife, and the flows of money that are fed by these things across national borders. But international rules and regulations in this field are evolving in ways that are far too soft to have much impact. How so?   In 2008, the world economy stood at the edge of an abyss, confronted by the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In response, a powerful new forum called the G20 was born, representing the 20 largest economies. The United Nations (UN) tentatively embraced the emergence of this new group and offered its New York headquarters as the site of the G20 summit meetings, but their overtures were declined and the UN was gradually marginalised from the process, something that should have set the alarm bells ringing. With hindsight it appears as though the G20’s founders wanted to explore new relationships in international economics unhindered by the democracy and transparency of the UN.   Shortly afterwards the World Economic Forum (or Davos for short) started to frame its own path forward which fits squarely into the philosophy of the G20 and other groups like it. Called the ‘Global Redesign Initiative,’ its aim is to marginalize intergovernmental decision-making and install ‘multi-stakeholder governance’ in its place.   “In the world of Davos,” as commentator Nick Buxton wrote in 2014, “the tired old slow world of democratic demands channelled through states is replaced by a slicker, fast moving, corporate-led governance” which places tremendous power in the hands of the very few. Buxton’s report for the Transnational Institute reveals that the world’s wealth is even more concentrated than is often understood—not in the one per cent of the world’s population but in the 0.001 per cent.   A mere 111,000 people control a fifth of the world’s gross national product (GNP), worth US$16.3 trillion.   The Davos proposal is that key sectors of the economy, and whole regions of countries, should be governed by corporations with the support of other stakeholders who they invite to the table. The most attractive parts of the world from this point of view are those that are resource rich but governance poor, where the large-scale extraction of mineral and biological resources is still possible, in part because local structures for oversight and accountability are weak.   Extractive economies are much more difficult to operate in places where these structures are strong and democratic, and where the probability of a public outcry is therefore high.   There’s another problem here: communities whose traditional lands sit on top of gold, oil or timber are obvious targets for attack. But what happens to wildlife that offers no obvious source of profit? If a tiger has no value, why would it be saved? This is where the monetization of nature is so important.   In 2014, the writer Charles Eisenstein published a piece on openDemocracy that expanded on this phenomenon. We must recognise that “some things are beyond measure and price” as he put it, warning of the dangers of relying on numbers and financial data for decision-making. There are many things we don’t measure, either by choice (because they interfere with established power relationships); because our understanding is incomplete; or because some things are simply un-measurable—like beauty, connectedness, spiritual fulfilment or the sight of reindeer, wolves and golden eagles living with the Dukha in Mongolia.   When I wake up in the morning the sound I hear is of a magpie’s warble. These birds and their unique and haunting song, as well as the kangaroos that stand on the ridge at dusk close to my home, are part of the culture in which I live and the community I belong to.   People elsewhere, in South Africa, Pakistan, Russia or Peru will wake up to different sounds and vistas, but our landscapes are never empty places; nor are they commodities to sell. They are filled with a different kind of richness which we value in other ways. They are filled with wildlife with which we commune.   That’s why we can’t let the monetary value of nature be used as the sole criterion for governance. A tiger has value because it is a tiger, because it is priceless in and of itself. That’s why it should be saved, but under the rule of ‘Davos man’ this is most unlikely.   In fact monetizing wildlife leads to over exploitation wherever money can be made and under protection where it can’t. The only real solution is to reject the underlying philosophy of nature as a profit centre. Everything else follows from that shift.   The World Economic Forum will meet again in Davos in January 2017, under the now-familiar umbrella of “improving global governance through public-private cooperation.” However, power can only be ceded to the Global Redesign Initiative and similar efforts if we as citizens allow it.   Instead, we should demand that our governments actually govern in the interests of the vast majority of their populations, and of the wild species among whom we want to live.   We can demand that global conservation is democratized to protect what we see as precious, sacred, special and important, not what makes most money for corporations. Wherever we have democracy, we must assert our control.   Tigers, elephants, forests, wetlands and rivers are not commodities whose value can be siphoned off into the pockets of investors and ignored when they don’t make a profit. They are our collective inheritance.   * UN Landmark accord agreed on world''s largest marine sanctuary for Antarctica''s Ross Sea: http://bit.ly/2fSrW9m Visit the related web page
	No one is born hating another person because of the colour of their skin by UN News, OHCHR   Aug. 2017   Racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or Islamophobia are poisoning our societies – UN chief. (UN News)   Urging people everywhere to speak out against hate speech and hate crimes, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has reiterated his call for tolerance, respect for the other and the importance of recognizing diversity.   “Racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or Islamophobia are poisoning our societies,” the Secretary-General told journalists in New York.   “It is absolutely essential for us all to stand up against them everywhere and every time,” he added.   Mr. Guterres underlined the values of tolerance, respect for the other, and the importance of recognition of diversity.   “To be able to stand for these values at the same time, to condemn all forms of irrationality that undermine those values is essential, at the present moment, everywhere in the world,” the head of the UN said.   March 2017   UN rights chief urges governments to target hate speech, crimes. (OHCHR)   On the eve of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the United Nations human rights chief has reminded Governments around the world that they have a legal obligation to stop hate speech and hate crimes, and called on people everywhere to “stand up for someone’s rights.”   “Politics of division and the rhetoric of intolerance are targeting racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, and migrants and refugees. Words of fear and loathing can, and do, have real consequences,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said.   The High Commissioner’s statement comes ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, marked annually on 21 March. The theme for this year is ending racial profiling and incitement to hatred, including as it relates to people’s attitudes and actions towards migration.   At the Summit for Refugees and Migrants in September 2016, UN Member States adopted a Declaration strongly condemning acts and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.   In his statement, Mr. Zeid said that States do not have any excuse to allow racism and xenophobia to fester.   States “have the legal obligation to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination, to guarantee the right of everyone, no matter their race, colour, national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law”.   He urged Governments to adopt legislation expressly prohibiting racist hate speech, including the dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination, and threats or incitement to violence.   “It is not an attack on free speech or the silencing of controversial ideas or criticism, but a recognition that the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities,” he said. http://bit.ly/2wc9uki Visit the related web page
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