Havana, Cuba, 4 July 2007
- Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear colleagues,
I have been given 35 minutes to address you
this morning on the issue of environment and
development and the linkage to climate change.
I have also been asked to address the question
of what the latest developments in the United
Nations and the multilateral system may imply
for the work of UNEP.
However let me begin by thanking the Cuban
authorities, my friends and colleagues here
in the Ministry of Science Technology and
Environment, and also the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs for having made it possible for me
to join you for this quite unique gathering.
It is a gathering that Cuba organizes regularly
and it is certainly growing in terms of interest
and popularity. Indeed this is one of the
reasons why I was interested in coming to
Cuba personally. To learn at first hand this
linkage between environmental sustainability,
economic development and social justice that
is a key concern of Cuba's public policy.
As mentioned in your very kind and generous
introduction, I am the son of a farmer and
I grew up on a farm in Brazil before spending
an important part of my life working in the
field of rural development.
As the years passed I increasingly became
convinced that if we talk about development-
and development particularly for those who
are not in the cities, who live in the rural
areas and who are often the poorest in terms
of modern access to services and resources-
then understanding the role of environment
in development is a foundation for achieving
sustainable development.
I began my life professionally as an economist
and as regional planner. In India and Pakistan
I worked both with an NGO and then later with
a government department.
It was in these roles that I first began
to see with my very own eyes that if we failed
to understand how poor rural communities are
dependent on managing their environmental
resources- not simply from a survival point
of view but from a livelihood and development
point of view- then all our efforts at bringing
resources into the rural economy would on
many occasions be wasted and sometimes would
in fact undermine the very minimum of reliance
that people have on these resources.
So in many ways, this is my headline for
my address here today-managing the environmental
dimension of sustainable development in the
21st century.
Let me begin by characterizing environmental
thinking from the last century to this new
one.
In the 20th Century, the environment and
environmentalism was often associated with
combating the negative out-comes of development.
It was about pollution, it was about cleaning
up something that had been left behind by
industrialization or by unplanned agricultural
development and it evolved into a kind of
licensing and authorizing process of issuing
permits and making fines on people who were
not following regulations.
It was also about establishing protected
areas. Society had not yet fully grasped an
understanding of biodiversity, so instead
we resorted to protecting some parts of the
world from the 'blind' development which did
not recognize the true costs of ecosystem
and biodiversity loss.
Environment in the 20th Century was also
about protecting specific ecosystems and locations
be it a river basin, a wetland or a forest.
Ladies and gentlemen, we were struggling
to try and bring the beginnings of a modern
scientific understanding of ecology, biology
and natural sciences to the basic challenge
of managing development.
However, the focus is rapidly shifting as
are the debates in Cuba, Latin America and
the world at large. We no longer have the
privilege of trying to save environmental
assets on a local level, one by one, because
we are today confronted with an environmental
change phenomenon that is of a completely
different quality and magnitude.
We have moved from the local degradation
of natural resources to compromising the long
term functionality of entire systems. Society,
informed by modern ecological science, is
only just opening its eyes to these connections
and linking action, cause and effect.
There have been visionaries who, over the
past century, have made these connections
and gained insight into natural systems. But
society in general is only just beginning
to appreciate the wide ranging and systemic
environmental change and the consequences
that we are now facing in the 21st century.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached a point
at which human beings are beginning to affect
the entire climate system, the hydrological
cycle and the nutrient cycle that in turn
is affecting the productivity of soils to
mention just 3 examples of systemic change.
We are also now affecting entire ecosystems
in which the survival of species is threatened
by human encroachment, over exploitation or
simply lack of habitat.
