Planetary Emergency

The fight against climate change has developed huge momentum in UK and elsewhere. But if this movement is to have stamina, and if it is to embrace the other scarce environmental resources under threat, we must move the debate out of the box marked ‘environment’.

Al Gore calls this a ‘planetary emergency’. It is. But one of the reasons why the world has been slow to wake up to the threat from climate change is that is has been bracketed as an environmental issue – a threat to nature rather than people. It is more than that.

It is a potential humanitarian emergency – since the consequence of failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change will be suffering on a grand scale. It is a development issue, as the poorest nations will be affected the most even though they have done least to cause it. And as Sir Nicholas Stern’s report showed last year, it is also a financial and economic issue – while the cost of arresting climate change is around 1 per cent of global GDP, the cost of dealing with the consequence is between 5 and 20 per cent of global GDP.

...... As Margaret Beckett has argued, tackling climate change must be as critical to the Foreign Office and Defence Ministry as it is to Defra.

Source: David Miliband
www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk