Business (and jobs) for climate: the wake-up we need

From the screens of the last meeting on climate in Copenhagen the Australian actress Cate Blanchett played a different role than in her movies: she interpreted the climate embassador reminding the experience of Marysville, her home town that was destroyed by the bush fires last February¹. More catastrophic fires in Southeast Australia are predicted than in the past with considerable implications for the agricultural sector from increasing droughts and in all the world other worrying trends are threatening people’s lives and nations’ economies including glaciers meltdown, sea level rise and coral reef bleeching.

After the Climate Congress in March, the Danish capital has become the permanent stage of the “climate crisis” play, last act being the World Business Summit on Climate Change² (24 - 26 May) organized by the Copenhagen Climate Council, Climate Group 3C (Combat Climate Change), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Global Compact and the World Economic Forum on Climate Change. It has been attended by 500 business leaders and representatives from governments and NGOs and it was another step in the dialogue between the various parts of the global society to produce necessary actions and decisions in the next 6 months and onwards. The key points emerged in the three days were synthesized in a summary for policy makers, the “recipes” that we want our political leaders to cook in the end. Some of the messages are very clear, if not obvious:

• business needs clear and long-term policy objectives and the world needs far-seeing entrepreneurs to boost a low carbon economy for the future;

• new financial instruments, like “climate bonds”, are required;

• the greenhouse gas stabilization path should set an ambitious target for 2050, to give a longer time-frame than Kyoto, but also for 2020, not to lower pressure and urgency;

• carbon price stability, public incentives and support are needed to finance low carbon technologies;

• subsidies have to be stopped on high emission transport and energy infrastructure as well as on deforestation;

• funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change are to be largely increased.

The concluding Copenhagen call states that we have to “revive the growth in a sustainable way”, but a few doubts persist: do we have to grow infinitely or certain paradigms can be changed? plus what does sustainable really mean? “A more secure climate system” will never be a deterministic product of human actions alone, but as we have been able to drastically upset the climate, we can certainly apply the existing and invent new solutions before it is too late. Blanchett summarized the human behaviour on Earth saying that ”we have made choices in our culture and methods to dominate and subject rather than work with and listen to the planet”; fundamental systems of thought have to be renewed to meet the challenge to somehow step back before irreversibly compromising the planet where our future generations will live on. Certainly a new green economy needs create new job places and new jobs, people and companies have to be motivated to save energy, produce and consume more renewable energy, work and live having in mind the consequences of actions and ways of thinking.

Ban Ki-Moon, like Kofi Annan did in the past, is pushing the international community to jump in the future: he launched the campaign “Seal the deal”³ to secure a success for a post-Kyoto agreement in December. Will the present peoples and nations, with all the persisting differences in wealth, behaviour, religion and so on, be able to speak a common language and lead the change in reality, well beyond the commas and full stops of the new treaty? History will tell us: maybe a more sustainable, more altruistic and happier human race is there in the future just waiting to show up.

Written by Luca Marazzi on behalf of Responding To Climate Change

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_2009_Victorian_bushfires
2. http://www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/world-business-summit.html
3. http://www.sealthedeal2009.org