Today's Date:

We are all citizens of the earth

On 2 and 3 February, the environment conference, to which President Chirac has invited representatives from around 50 countries, will be held in Paris. Its objective is simple but ambitious: to launch a solemn appeal for the creation of a United Nations Environment Organization (UNEO) – like the other global organizations for education, science and culture (UNESCO), health (WHO) and trade (WTO).

Who can deny there is an emergency? After a period of widespread doubt and indifference, the public at large, alerted by the warnings of several leading figures whose utterances attract wide media attention, are currently undergoing a veritable intellectual and moral revolution: they are realizing that, for the first time in its history, mankind can destroy itself and its planet. Suddenly, mankind understands that its survival is at stake, that a collective suicide is in progress, that “the house is on fire”. I won’t dwell on this. It is beginning to be recognized, even though there is still a lot to do to overcome the scepticism and ignorance.

Global warming is undoubtedly the major challenge. Deforestation, which, despite the most alarming warnings, is continuing at a frightening pace in all the main primary forests and aggravating the situation by reducing the world’s CO 2 absorption capacity. Overexploitation of natural resources bodes ill for the future. If the emerging countries’ per capita consumption of natural resources ends up as high as that of the major developed countries, several planets would not be sufficient for us all.

Biodiversity is reducing: the number of living species disappearing every year is staggering. Without being Malthusian, let’s also remember that the exponential increase in the human population since the nineteenth century is one of the main causes of all kinds of imbalances which are increasing the vulnerability of life on earth. I shall end there my swift summary of the challenges we have to confront.

Realizing what is happening is not enough, we must now actively search for solutions. First, we must clearly define the objective. The goal isn't to produce less, consume less, travel less… but to produce differently, consume differently, travel differently. We haven’t got to organize a reversal of growth, but another form of growth, measured very probably by a slightly less crude statistical tool than our current GNP (although this includes the services so valuable for our well-being…), an ecological one going, in any case, hand in hand with efforts to reduce waste and use of non-renewable resources. We have to create a great chain of initiatives, from the local to the global levels.

Everything begins in our daily lives, where we live, in our rural areas, but mostly in our towns. Towns are in the front line when it comes to triggering and developing the ecological revolution. First of all, they have responsibility of organizing their inhabitants' mode of transport, ensuring the operation of less-polluting public transport, returning public spaces to cyclists and pedestrians. They are also responsible for the collection and treatment of household rubbish and other waste, and particularly for recycling. Responsible too for more sensible management of their water resources. Responsible for encouraging environmentally friendly building and town planning, i.e. for requiring compliance with high environmental standards when issuing building permits or approving town planning schemes.

The chain extends to the national level. Governments have a significant role to play: to implement the polluter-pay principle, tax carbon production, use the fiscal lever to encourage use of biofuels, greater use of rail freight and energy saving. The regional link is important. In France, we think, of course, of the role of the European Union, from which we expect a more pro-active energy policy, the setting of standards affording greater protection to our health, our security, our national balances and environments and pursuit of the agricultural policy reform with a view to enhancing respect for our environment.

At last, at the end of the chain, comes the global governance link. There are today 500 international agreements relating to the environment; most are not so well known as the famous Kyoto Protocol. There are also 18 agencies, programmes or international institutions with a remit in this sphere, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It's easy to see the flaws in this set-up: proliferation of instruments, fragmentation of decision-making centres, inter-institutional rivalry, absence of coherent international policy, the structural weaknesses of UNEP, which has no rule-making and little operational capability – and then there’s the cost of all those flaws. Hence the proposal put forward by Jacques Chirac and formalized by the European Union to create a lead organization, bringing together all the players in a global environment policy and drawing inspiration from the best existing international practices. It will be up to the forthcoming Paris conference to shape it.

I should just like to talk here about some of the objections which might be raised to it. Some will come from the developed countries, and principally the United States of America, who, as we know, mistrusts the UN system which it always suspects of dragging its feet and of inefficiency. We shall have to keep a watchful eye on the performance of the new organization and take, ahead of time, every care to give it stringent operating rules. Other criticisms will be made by the emerging countries, which fear seeing their growth slowed down by new standards and constraints which the old industrialized nations did not suffer during their own industrial revolutions. We have to take this fear on board, but we must also endeavour to convince these countries that if they refuse to join in the rescue of our common planet they won't escape the heralded disaster. Our survival is their survival. The poor countries, finally, will rightly question us on what they can expect from such an initiative. Will it be a luxury of the rich countries? Will it increase inequality across the world? These questions are legitimate and we shall have to answer them by committing to integrate the environment fully with policies to promote development and the fight against poverty, i.e. to help the developing countries participate in our ecological revolution through not just financial but also technological support. Undoubtedly they too have a lot to teach us when it comes to respecting nature and life… (…)./.