This post is also available in: Portuguese (Brazil)
By Mićo Tatalović, SciDev.
The starting document for negotiations ahead of the Rio+20 summit ― the ‘zero draft’ ― contains more references to science than was expected by the scientific community, but still falls short on the specifics and avoids mentioning some critical, science-related issues.
The document was published this week (10 January) and will form the basis for negotiations between governments leading up to the signing of the non-binding document at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil later this year (20–22 June).
The section on science and technology (S&T) recognises the importance of S&T and innovation in promoting sustainable development, and stresses the need for “effective mechanisms, enhanced means, appropriate enabling environments, and the removal of obstacles to the scaling up of the development and transfer of technology to developing countries”. It proposes to strengthen international cooperation to ease “investment and technology transfer, development and diffusion”.
It also proposes that governments should “facilitate international collaborative research on green technologies involving developing countries”; “support developing countries’ scientists and engineers, and scientific and engineering institutions; and foster their efforts to develop green local technologies and use traditional knowledge”, as well as encourage the creation of centres of research and development (R&D) excellence.
The draft also calls for “the scientific basis for decision-making to be strengthened across the UN system and recognise that the interface between science and policymaking should be enhanced”.
This recognition that government actions must be underpinned by research — and that one needs science first to enable policy action — is crucial, according to Peter Bates, science officer at the International Council for Science (ICSU), which is co-organising partner for the ‘Scientific and Technological Community Major Group’, together with the World Federation of Engineering Organizations.
The draft encourages specific research, such as “scientific studies and initiatives aimed at raising wider awareness of the economic benefits of sustainable land management policies that achieve healthy and productive land and soil” and calls for “public-private partnerships aiming to enhance capacity and technology for environmentally sound waste management”.
Bates said that, from the S&T point of view, ICSU was “pretty pleased” with the document.
“The main things we’ve been pushing for are all in there. They could be strengthened in many ways but, overall, there are more mentions of [S&T] than we expected.”
“We would like to push for broader funding mechanisms for general research into sustainable development, not just R&D for green technologies ― an international mechanism or a commitment to provide consistent funding.”
Bates said there was still scope to push for more science in future drafts, as negotiators do not find science as threatening as other issues to their other interests.
“The only thing that would be threatening to them is if you really to start to ask for more money. But, in general, the idea of technology transfer, increased capacity for development and these kinds of things are not particularly threatening so I would hope they would get through OK.”
One conspicuous absence is any mention of emerging new technologies, such as synthetic biology or geoengineering, and their regulation, topics that non-governmental groups wanted included.
Farooq Ullah, head of policy and advocacy at Stakeholder Forum, a civil society pressure group, said: “There needs to be some sort of control, even potentially a global convention on control of new and emerging technologies”.
“These are potentially very, very powerful solutions in terms of giving us the ability to address some of the key problems of the age [such as global warming or energy supply], but, if used in a wrong way, or with unforeseen consequences, they can cause their own problems.”
The zero draft suggests that governments should either form a sustainable development council, or improve the work of the current Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). It fails to mention an intergovernmental panel on science that would help the council make decisions.
This panel, known as the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Sustainable Development’ would have tried to bring fragmented scientific knowledge under one roof, to help the proposed council. It had been proposed by Indonesia, the Stakeholder Forum, the Major Group for Children and Youth, and other bodies.
Another major limitation of the document is its focus on green economic growth without discussion of the politically sensitive concept of the natural limits of the planet, according to Ullah. “This is a key concept in sustainable development, for it not to be explicitly mentioned is to me a dangerous oversight.”
Equipo editorial
To children everywhere,
Please explore what is willfully ignored and conspicuously unexplored. Many ‘experts’ appear to have sold out to the “one percent” by participating in the widespread denial of science regarding the issue of human population dynamics/overpopulation. One the one hand we have the deafening silence of scientists and on the other we have pseudo-scientists who broadcast whatever self-serving thought, contrived logic and ideology their benefactors demand. The human community is being deceived with false promises and directed down a primrose path by unsavory, mutually aggrandizing leaders. These so-called leaders are erroneously believed to possess the intellectual honesty, moral courage and will to act boldly that is required to acknowledge, address and overcome the colossal threat posed to future human well being and environmental health by the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers.
Any exploration of what is being deliberately avoided and repeatedly denied would include, I suppose, an examination of the best available scientific evidence related to the most accurate placement of the human species within the natural order of living things as well as all the seminal research related to the way the world we inhabit actually works. Perhaps rigorous scrutiny of “human creatureliness”, an easily observed aspect within the breadth of humanness, could be a point of investigation. Very little attention and research has been dedicated to this aspect of our all-too-human nature. Another point of inquiry has to do with the nature of the world we inhabit, with particular attention to the shape, make-up and ecology of Earth. Is our planetary home flat or round? Is the Earth like a teat at which the human species can forever suckle or is the planet composed of limited resources that are being wantonly dissipated today? Is the ecology of Earth frangible and can its ecosystems be degraded by human pollution to a point at which the Earth could become unfit for human habitation?
Children, why not invite your friends, parents, teachers and other elders like me to speak truthfully with you about what efforts are being made to assure a good enough future for you by pursuing a path toward sustainability? Despite your elders’ claims of ignorance about what it means to live sustainably, do not be fooled. They are playing stupid. The challenge for you is to call out your elders and insist they simply acknowledge that no one with wealth and power in the 1% wants to stop what is known today as “business as usual” practices, much less sensibly begin to plan for the right-sizing of ‘too big to fail’ corporations. Open discussions are everywhere eschewed of plans for transitioning away from the legitimization of transnational corporate ‘persons’. Too-big-to-succeed business empires are not being “powered down” to sustainable enterprises, ones that can exist in 2050 on a planet with the size, composition and environs of Earth. To this end, perhaps we can speak loudly, clearly and often about what your elders need to learn fast and well regarding how to live in our planetary home without recklessly dissipating its finite resources, as large-scale corporations are doing now; how to adjust outrageous per capita overconsumption patterns and individual hoarding lifestyles in preparation for an end to economic growth (not development); how to sensibly stabilize and then humanely reduce the size of the human population to a level that assures sustainability of the human species and life as we know it; and how to deal effectively with the relentless pollution and environmental degradation that is occurring on our watch.
The Rio 20 Conference will occur in June 2012. Where are the scientists who are ready, willing and able to discuss openly, objectively and honorably the “mother” of all emerging and converging, human-induced global challenges looming before the human family on our watch: human overpopulation? Have scientists capitulated to the politically correct agenda of the rich and powerful as well as agreed to speak only of that which the 1% determined is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially suitable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed? Children, perhaps I am mistaken about all of this. For your sake, I certainly hope so.
Please ask someone at the Population Under Pressure conference to comment on the ‘global predicament’ posed humanity on our watch by the unbridled growth worldwide of distinctly human overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities we can see overspreading the surface of Earth. What Andy Revkin describes as “humanity’s growth spurt” appears to minimize, even trivialize, a grave situation that is becoming harder and harder to acknowledge, address and overcome because human global overgrowth activities are overwhelming the finite physical resources and frangible ecology of the celestial orb we call our planetary home. The colossal presence of humankind on Earth in our time is much more formidable and fearsome than some sort of adolescent growth spurt. To describe the explosion of absolute global population numbers in such terms is jejeune and represents a subtle form of denial of what primarily threatens future human well being and environmental health.
Thank you,
Steve Salmony
Steven Earl Salmony
Chapel Hill, NC
Critical science communication follows…
http://www.populationmedia.org/2012/02/20/opinion-food-supply-and-population-growth/comment-page-1/#comment-12908
Comments from one and all are invited. Please add your perspective to the conversation to be found at the link above.
Thank you.
Steve Salmony
If scientists will choose to speak truth to the powerful, perhaps they will encourage other stonewalling leaders to do the right thing. At the moment many too many elders are remaining electively mute and appear unwilling to confront ‘the powers that be’ with the best science available regarding either the ‘placement’ of the human species within the order of living things on Earth or the most adequate understandings of the way the world we inhabit actually works. Such willful refusals by so many knowledgeable elders to assume their individual responsiblities to science and fulfill their well-established, collective duties to humanity are indefensible. Before it is too late for human action to change the perilous, human-induced course of unfolding and fulminating ecological events in our planetary home, perhaps enough people will speak out loudly and clearly in ‘one voice’ about what they believe to be real (according to the knowledge and the ‘lights’ they possess) regarding clear and imminent dangers to future human well being and environmental health that are visible on our watch. By so doing a global, internet-driven transformation of consciousness could literally spring up, as if out of nowhere, among human beings with feet of clay. Because the finite and frangible ‘reality’ of the natural world we inhabit has got to become more evident to people everywhere, day by day, and because the biological and physical limitations of the natural world will become obvious to people everywhere during the timeframe when humanity will face ‘peak everything’, humankind could sooner rather than later reach a point in space-time when a critical mass of people see and agree that ‘the endless growth’ paradigm that is so powerful and prominent in the human world in our time is, in fact, the telltale mark of insanity. Then the human (not the natural) world will have to change, the seemingly unassailable force of self-proclaimed masters of the universe, their global political/economic endless growth regime and mass media notwithstanding. Human overpopulation, overproduction and overconsumption activities would be reasonably, sensibly and humanely regulated worldwide. Human beings with feet of clay would not even be able to think in good faith of ourselves as Homo sapiens, much less behave as if there were no limits to growth on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth. Such circumstances would compel all of us at least to try and change behavior that can be seen readily as distinctly human and patently unsustainable lunacy. With regard to the construction of the ‘economic colossus’ we call a global political economy, the outrageous per capita overconsumption of limited resources and the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers, change toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized corporate enterprises would begin to occur ubiquitously. After all, there have got to be limits to the insanity of constructing any unsustainable human world by a species calling itself Homo sapiens sapiens. Somehow, somewhere, at some moment the leading elders in the human community must agree to limit something, some human activity. Any activity at all will work well. By so doing we change the endless growth paradigm and choose a new path, ‘a road less traveled by’, to the future. Until at least one human activity is meaningfully restrained, if not altogether halted from growing (at least momentarily), the unsustainable game of Ponzi we are recklessly and relentlessly playing will eventually lead to global destruction and degradation of a colossal, incalculable sort, I suppose.
We are going to make a difference. Thanks for all you are doing. It is so refreshing to be among people who are seeking knowledge of human population dynamics/overpopulation, rather than obstructing that effort or else plainly, consciously and deliberately playing stupid in a ‘rear-guard’ defense of a catastrophe-in-the-making status quo.